A Dictionary of Occupational Terms Based on the Classification of Occupations used in the Census of Population, 1921.

Go to Home Page

Using the Index



Index:  A  B  C  D  E  F  G  H  I  J  K  L  M  N  O  P  Q  R  S  T  U  V  W  XYZ 


The original dictionary has a comprehensive index. Unfortunately, because of its layout, it has proved problematic to digitise by optical character recognition. Instead, the online dictionary has its own index created directly from the digitised text of the dictionary entries.

This means that there is an exact match between the index and the dictionary entries (not always the case in the printed dictionary), but also that any errors in the headwords will be duplicated in the index.

Many terms are indexed in more than one place. With compound occupational terms, the dictionary entries often present the term with the final component first, e.g. cloth dresser has its dictionary entry under dresser, cloth. In the index, however, such a term will have two entries: dresser, cloth and cloth dresser. This means that you do no need to know exactly how the dictionary formulates such terms.

There is one useful feature in the online index which is not shared by the original: each entry in the online index shows which of the 32 Orders the term is included in. For common terms, this makes it easier to identify which of, say, the four dictionary entries for capper or the 32 for cutter is the one you are looking for.

The original dictionary does not include the occupations in Orders XXIV, XXV and XXII, and the terms in these orders are therefore not included in the index. They may be added to the online index at a later date.


Peter Christian, September 2016.