OED editor deleted 'foriegn' words She said: "I was the editor of the OED responsible for words from outside Europe and while editing these words I noticed a pattern that went against the general consensus: there were thousands of foreign words and words from varieties of English around the world in the dictionary and they had been put there by James Murray and his fellow editors. The irony of the whole story is that although in the beginning the dictionary editors were criticised for putting too many 'outlandish' words in the dictionary that were 'decaying' our language, one hundred years later they were criticised for the opposite: for too many British words in the dictionary and not enough foreign words! But it turns out that this was a myth perpetuated by a 20th-century Chief Editor of the OED. A spokesperson for the OED's publisher Oxford University Press said one of the dictionary's current policies was "to reevaluate any terms which were left out of the supplement by Burchfield" and that it still added new words from every English-speaking country. The spokesperson added that Burchfield "was insistent that the dictionary should expand its coverage of international words in English and, although he omitted minor terms from the supplement which he was revising and extending, he added many thousands of more fully researched international entries." Some words deleted by Robert Burchfield: Wake-up - a golden-winged woodpecker Shape - a Tibetan councillor Dinga - a wild bee of East India wading-place - Used to refer to a ford swamp fuchsia - Common name in Australian English for Eremophilia maculata, a species found in Queensland