THE MAIN FEATURES OF REGISTERING PRONUNCIATION VARIANTS IN THE 3rd EDITION OF THE OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY ONLINE (OED)

The article analyzes the main features of registering variant characteristics of English vowels and consonants, as well as of the suprasegmental means in the 3rd edition of the Oxford English Dictionary Online. A new notation for indicating pronunciation in British and American English is considered in detail and, according to the phonetic editors of the dictionary, transformational phenomena in the articulation of a number of phonemes are also presented. It is this circumstance, viewed through the prism of the dynamics of the English orthoepic standard, that led to a real attempt not only to fix and describe some active pronunciation phenomena in modern social and national variants of the English language, but to visualize them with the help of new or additional transcriptional symbols. In order to highlight the system for registering the pronunciation of the entries, the text of the article contains numerous examples, definitions in Russian and English.

Keywords: Oxford English Dictionary Online, variation and variability, lexicographic innovations, transcription system, character notation features.