I decided to take my underlying question regarding this subject to Jesse Sheidlower, Principal North American Editor of The Oxford English Dictionary..
> Jesse,
>
> I'm passing this along because the ultimate citation seems
> to warrant asking the following: as you guys make your
> online updates, are you in some cases simply dropping some
> words? and if so, how does this affect the *historical value
> of OED? just wondering..
No. No words are being removed from the OED, precisely because
it would affect its historical value. Often this does give
rise to problems, where we come across something that probably
shouldn't have been included originally, or where a definition
is clearly based on a misinterpretation of what was then more
limited evidence. But we don't remove these.
> (I do realize this may not be a good example of what I'm
> getting at, since the word in question can still be found
> under the 'see' headword, but still..)
Right, this particular example doesn't demonstrate this
issue. We _do_ revise entries in a way that might give the
appearance of something being removed--combining two senses
into one, for example, or taking things that were once
headwords and subsuming them into other entries--but nothing
goes away completely.
Best,
Jesse
-joe (I have an advanced degree in name-dropping) friday
NB: in the case of 'zyxt', a Find Word now comes up empty, whereas a full text search comes up with the variant under the headword 'see' and a citation under 'foleant' (zyxt thou foleant)
