The Internet has made a huge difference in this respect: with many works searchable online and digitized newspaper archives, some forms of search are much easier. In the past, this meant digging around in books and newspapers, and most research was done in the darker recesses of libraries. When a quotation is selected for inclusion in one of our collections, detailed follow-up research is carried out to verify its authenticity and to provide clear details of its context and background. Potential new quotations are entered in a database, the major source of material for new quotations dictionaries and for new editions of existing bestsellers. Oxford Quotations has a team of readers looking out for quotations and allusions as they are used in daily life. We face a daily torrent of language, of which just a few words may lodge in the public mind to be remembered and quoted days, weeks, or years later. Quotations can represent words in any form: books, newspapers, journals, letters, broadcast interviews, plays, films, online publication, emails, tweets, or simply one person talking to another face-to-face.

This association lends the quoter an enhanced authority, and adds weight to their argument. Most usually, a quotation is associated with someone famous and introduced with the words 'as X says', calling up the support of a distinguished writer or thinker for our own ideas. The words ‘other than’ are crucial here: a quotation is a saying that other people think worth repeating because it is well expressed – whether it is beautiful or funny, wise, or incongruous. Oxford Dictionaries defines a quotation as ‘a group of words taken from a text or speech and repeated by someone other than the original author or speaker’. You can explore these quotations in our books, or search a selection of popular quotations online at Oxford Reference. For over 70 years, Oxford has been collecting, sourcing, researching, and authenticating quotations, and in so doing it has developed one of the richest language resources in the world today.

Oxford english dictionary book quotes