Countdown finally ditches battered dictionary after introducing laptops
Countdown, an unlikely holdout against the creeping march of digitalisation, has finally succumbed to progress after producers agreed to bin their ragged copy of the Oxford English Dictionary, used to verify contestant’s answers, in favour of a laptop.
The switch will see presenter Susie Dent and the celebrity guest of the day log-in to oxforddictionaries.com instead of leafing through its printed equivalent – ending a tradition which has endured for all 32 years of the show’s run.
These changes have been introduced to remove the risk of disallowing newly minted words which have not yet had time to be printed in the book, which is only updated every two years – excluding terms such as badassery, omnishambles and srsly.
Commenting on the switch Dent said: “While I’ll miss rifling through the printed dictionary and using Countdown’s famous pencam, I’m excited that we will now be able to reflect the very latest changes to English by using an online dictionary that’s updated every three months.
"The principles of Dictionary Corner will remain exactly the same - it’s simply the technology that is changing.”
The changes will be implemented for the start of the 70th series, airing on 30 June.