The Oxford English Dictionary: History and Significance

Introduction: The Supreme Authority on English

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is the most comprehensive historical dictionary of the English language ever produced. With over 600,000 entries, 3.5 million illustrative quotations, and coverage spanning more than a thousand years of English, the OED is not just a dictionary—it is a vast archive of the English language's entire documented history. From the earliest Old English manuscripts to the latest neologisms of the digital age, the OED traces the life of every significant English word.

What distinguishes the OED from all other English dictionaries is its historical principle: every definition is supported by dated quotations showing how the word has been used from its first recorded appearance to the present. This means the OED is not merely a snapshot of current English but a comprehensive chronicle of linguistic change—a history of ideas, technology, culture, and society as reflected in the words we use.

Origins: The Philological Society's Vision

The story of the OED begins in 1857, when the Philological Society of London—a scholarly organization devoted to the study of language—resolved that existing English dictionaries were inadequate. A committee led by Richard Chenevix Trench, Herbert Coleridge, and Frederick Furnivall proposed an ambitious new project: a dictionary that would inventory every word in the English language, trace each one from its earliest known use, and illustrate its meaning and development through quotations from published texts.

The project was originally called "A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles" (NED). Herbert Coleridge was appointed as the first editor in 1860 but died of tuberculosis the following year at age 30, having already collected over 100,000 citation slips. Frederick Furnivall succeeded him but proved better at inspiring volunteers than managing the editorial process. After two decades of collection but little actual editing, the Philological Society partnered with Oxford University Press, which agreed to publish the dictionary and fund a professional editorial operation.

James Murray and the Scriptorium

In 1879, James Murray, a largely self-educated Scottish schoolmaster with extraordinary linguistic abilities (he knew over twenty languages), was appointed as editor. Murray proved to be the right man for the enormous job—he was systematic, indefatigable, and possessed of an almost unlimited capacity for painstaking work.

Murray constructed a purpose-built workspace in his garden at Banbury Road, Oxford—an iron shed he called the Scriptorium (writing room). Lined with pigeonholes to hold the millions of citation slips, the Scriptorium became the nerve center of the greatest lexicographic enterprise in history. Here Murray and a small team of editors spent twelve to fourteen hours a day, six days a week, sorting citations, writing definitions, and tracing word histories.

The working conditions were demanding and the pace grueling. Murray had initially estimated that the dictionary could be completed in ten years. As the true scale of the project became apparent, this estimate proved wildly optimistic. Murray worked on the dictionary for 36 years, from 1879 until his death in 1915, completing roughly half of the alphabet. He never saw the finished work, a fact that lends his dedication a poignant quality. For more on Murray and other dictionary pioneers, see our article on famous lexicographers.

The Volunteer Reading Program

The OED's most innovative feature was its reliance on a massive volunteer reading program. Murray issued appeals in newspapers, bookshops, and scholarly journals, asking literate English speakers to read published works and submit quotation slips for interesting, rare, or early uses of words. The response was extraordinary—thousands of volunteers from around the English-speaking world sent in millions of slips over several decades.

The most prolific single contributor was Dr. William Chester Minor, an American surgeon and Civil War veteran who submitted over 12,000 meticulously researched quotations. Murray corresponded with Minor for years before discovering that his most valuable contributor was confined to the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum, having shot a man during a psychotic episode. Their remarkable collaboration became the subject of Simon Winchester's bestselling book The Professor and the Madman (1998).

The volunteer reading program was essentially a 19th-century form of crowdsourcing, predating the concept by more than a century. It demonstrated that a sufficiently motivated public could contribute meaningfully to a major scholarly enterprise—a principle that resonates with modern collaborative projects from Wikipedia to citizen science.

The First Edition (1884–1928)

The dictionary was published in installments (called fascicles) beginning in 1884 with the section A–Ant. Publication continued intermittently over the next 44 years, with the final fascicle (Wise–Wyzen) appearing in 1928. The complete first edition, published as A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, contained approximately 414,800 entries with 1,827,306 illustrative quotations in 15,490 pages across twelve volumes.

After Murray's death in 1915, the editorial work was carried forward by Henry Bradley, William Craigie, and C. T. Onions, all of whom made substantial contributions. The completed dictionary was reissued in 1933 as the Oxford English Dictionary (the name by which it is known today), together with a one-volume supplement of new words that had emerged during the 44 years of publication.

Supplements and the Second Edition

The English language didn't stop evolving when the first edition was completed, and keeping the OED current became an ongoing challenge. Between 1972 and 1986, Robert Burchfield edited a four-volume Supplement to the OED that added vast quantities of new vocabulary, including words from science, technology, popular culture, and the many varieties of English spoken around the world.

In 1989, the second edition (OED2) was published, merging the original text, Burchfield's supplements, and additional new material into a single unified work. The twenty volumes of OED2 contained 291,500 main entries with 615,100 word forms and 2,436,600 quotations. Physically, it weighed 137.72 pounds and occupied four feet of shelf space. It was produced with the help of computers—a new technology at the time—that allowed the editorial team to merge and format the massive text more efficiently than would have been possible by hand.

How the OED Is Structured

Understanding the structure of an OED entry reveals the depth of information each one contains:

• Headword: The word being defined, with variant spellings past and present.
• Pronunciation: Given in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), showing both current and historical pronunciations where relevant.
• Part of speech and inflected forms: Grammatical classification with irregular forms.
• Etymology: A detailed account of the word's origin and development, tracing it through earlier forms and source languages. The OED's etymological research is considered the gold standard.
• Definitions: Organized historically, with the earliest known meaning first, followed by subsequent developments. Each sense is numbered and may include subsenses.
• Quotations: Dated quotations illustrating each sense, arranged chronologically from earliest to most recent. These quotations form the empirical evidence for the definitions.

This historical arrangement means that reading an OED entry is like watching a word's biography unfold—from birth (first recorded use) through its various life stages (shifting meanings) to either continued vitality or obsolescence.

The Digital OED

The OED went online in 2000, transforming access to this vast resource. The digital format offered several revolutionary advantages over print: hyperlinked cross-references, full-text search across the entire dictionary, the ability to search quotations by author, date, or source, and regular updates that kept the dictionary current without waiting for a new print edition.

The online OED is updated quarterly, with each update adding new words, new senses of existing words, and revised entries based on the ongoing third-edition revision. These updates typically add several hundred new entries and revise thousands of existing ones, keeping the dictionary responsive to linguistic change in near real-time. This continuous update model represents a fundamental departure from the decades-long publication cycles of the print era and exemplifies how modern dictionaries are made.

The Third Edition: A Complete Revision

Since the early 2000s, the OED editorial team has been working on a comprehensive third edition (OED3) that involves revising every existing entry from scratch. This is necessary because many entries in the current dictionary still contain text written over a century ago, reflecting outdated scholarship, cultural attitudes, and editorial standards.

The revision uses modern corpus evidence, updated etymological research, and contemporary editorial standards. Each revised entry benefits from the vast digital resources now available—databases of historical texts, newspapers, and other sources that were inaccessible to earlier editors. The revision is being published exclusively online, with no current plans for a print third edition—a reflection of the reality that a work of this scale is better served by the flexibility of digital publication.

The scope of the project is staggering. With hundreds of thousands of entries to revise, each requiring careful re-examination of definitions, quotations, and etymologies, the third edition is expected to take decades to complete. It represents the most ambitious dictionary revision ever attempted, a project worthy of the dictionary that has set the standard for English lexicography since 1884.

Why the OED Matters

The Oxford English Dictionary matters because it is more than a dictionary—it is a monument to the English language itself. For scholars, it is an indispensable research tool that documents the history of English vocabulary with unmatched thoroughness. For writers, it is a source of inspiration and authority. For curious readers, it is a treasury of linguistic discovery, where every entry tells a story about how English speakers have used, adapted, and created words over the centuries.

The OED also matters as a model of what human collaboration and dedication can achieve. From the Philological Society's 1857 resolution to the ongoing third-edition revision, the project has engaged the efforts of thousands of contributors—editors, readers, scholars, and volunteers—over more than 160 years. It is one of the great intellectual enterprises of modern civilization, comparable in ambition and scope to the mapping of the human genome or the compilation of a comprehensive encyclopedia.

For anyone who loves words—their histories, their nuances, their power to shape thought and express emotion—the Oxford English Dictionary is the ultimate resource. It stands as proof that language, properly documented and understood, reveals the full richness of human experience.