The Oxford English Dictionary: History and Significance

Meet the Great Historical Dictionary of English

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is the largest and most detailed historical record of English vocabulary ever assembled. It contains more than 600,000 entries, about 3.5 million supporting quotations, and evidence drawn from over a millennium of written English. It is far more than a standard dictionary. The OED works like a documentary archive, following English words from Old English texts through medieval, early modern, modern, and digital-era usage.

Its defining feature is the historical method. Instead of giving only present-day meanings, the OED places definitions alongside dated examples that show a word in actual use. A reader can see when a word first appears in the record, how its senses shift, and which meanings survive, fade, or change direction. Because of that, the OED is also a history of culture, science, technology, politics, literature, and everyday life as preserved in language.

How the Philological Society Started It

The OED’s beginnings go back to 1857. That year, the Philological Society of London, a learned group devoted to language study, decided that the English dictionaries then available did not do the job properly. Richard Chenevix Trench, Herbert Coleridge, and Frederick Furnivall helped lead a committee that imagined something much larger: a dictionary that would gather the words of English, record their earliest known appearances, and explain their growth through quotations from printed sources.

At first, the project was known as A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles (NED). Herbert Coleridge became its first editor in 1860, but tuberculosis killed him the next year, when he was only 30. By then he had already gathered more than 100,000 citation slips. Frederick Furnivall took over and was excellent at recruiting enthusiastic helpers, though less effective at keeping the editorial work moving. After nearly twenty years of collecting evidence without enough finished dictionary text, the Philological Society reached an agreement with Oxford University Press, which would publish the work and support a more formal editorial staff.

James Murray’s Garden Workshop

In 1879, James Murray was chosen as editor. Murray was a Scottish schoolmaster, largely self-taught, with remarkable gifts for languages; he knew more than twenty of them. The appointment proved crucial. He brought order, stamina, and an intense devotion to detail to a project that could easily have collapsed under its own size.

Murray built a special workspace in the garden of his home on Banbury Road in Oxford. It was an iron building that he called the Scriptorium, meaning writing room. Inside, rows of pigeonholes held the growing mountain of quotation slips. The Scriptorium became the headquarters for one of the most demanding dictionary projects ever attempted. Murray and a small editorial team worked long days, often twelve to fourteen hours, six days a week, sorting evidence, drafting definitions, and reconstructing the histories of words.

The work was slow, exhausting, and much bigger than anyone had expected. Murray first thought the dictionary might be finished within ten years. That prediction soon looked impossible. He remained at the task for 36 years, from 1879 until his death in 1915, and completed about half the alphabet. He did not live to see the dictionary finished, which makes the scale of his commitment all the more striking. For more about Murray and other major figures in dictionary history, see our article on famous lexicographers.

Readers Who Built the Evidence

One of the OED’s boldest ideas was its dependence on volunteer readers. Murray and his colleagues placed appeals in newspapers, scholarly periodicals, and bookshops, asking educated English speakers to read widely and send in slips containing notable, old, unusual, or especially clear uses of words. The response was enormous. Over several decades, thousands of readers across the English-speaking world mailed in millions of examples.

The most productive individual contributor was Dr. William Chester Minor, an American surgeon and veteran of the Civil War. He supplied more than 12,000 carefully researched quotations. Murray exchanged letters with Minor for years before learning that this exceptionally useful correspondent was being held at Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum after shooting a man during a psychotic episode. Their unusual partnership later became the focus of Simon Winchester’s bestselling 1998 book The Professor and the Madman.

Seen from a modern angle, the reading program looks like an early form of crowdsourcing. It came more than a century before that word became common. The program showed that a large, committed public could make real contributions to serious scholarship, much as later collaborative efforts would do in projects such as Wikipedia and citizen science.

The Long Road to the First Edition

Publication began in 1884, not as a finished set but in installments known as fascicles. The first covered A–Ant. New sections appeared off and on for the next 44 years, until the final fascicle, Wise–Wyzen, was issued in 1928. The completed first edition, published under the title A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, filled twelve volumes. It contained about 414,800 entries, 1,827,306 illustrative quotations, and 15,490 pages.

When Murray died in 1915, the editing did not stop. Henry Bradley, William Craigie, and C. T. Onions continued the work, each adding significantly to the finished dictionary. In 1933, the completed work was reissued under the name Oxford English Dictionary, the title by which it is now known. That reissue also included a one-volume supplement recording new vocabulary that had appeared during the 44-year publication period.

Later Additions and OED2

English kept changing after the first edition appeared, so maintaining the OED became a permanent responsibility. From 1972 to 1986, Robert Burchfield edited a four-volume Supplement to the OED. It added large amounts of vocabulary from science, technology, popular culture, and English varieties used in many parts of the world.

The second edition, known as OED2, appeared in 1989. It combined the first edition, Burchfield’s supplements, and other new material into one integrated work. OED2 ran to twenty volumes and included 291,500 main entries, 615,100 word forms, and 2,436,600 quotations. As a physical object, it weighed 137.72 pounds and took up four feet of shelf space. Computers, still a new tool in this kind of editorial production, helped the team merge, organize, and format the immense text far more efficiently than manual methods would have allowed.

What You Find Inside an OED Entry

An OED entry is built to show not only what a word means, but how the evidence for that meaning developed. A typical entry may include:

• Quotations: Dated examples for each sense, normally arranged from earliest to latest. These quotations provide the evidence behind the definitions.
• Etymology: A detailed history of the word’s origin, earlier forms, and source languages. The OED’s etymological research is widely treated as the gold standard.
• Headword: The word being treated, along with historical and current spelling variants.
• Definitions: Meanings arranged historically, beginning with the earliest known sense and moving through later developments. Numbered senses may also contain subsenses.
• Part of speech and inflected forms: Grammatical information, including irregular forms where needed.
• Pronunciation: Pronunciations in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), with older pronunciations included when relevant.

Because entries follow historical order, reading one can feel like reading a word’s life story. You see its first recorded appearance, its changing roles, its newer meanings, and sometimes its disappearance from ordinary use.

The OED on the Web

The OED moved online in 2000, and that shift changed how people could use it. The digital version made possible full-text searching across the dictionary, linked cross-references, searches of quotations by author, date, or source, and regular updates without waiting for another printed edition.

The online OED is updated four times a year. Each release adds new words, new meanings for existing words, and revised entries produced as part of the third-edition project. Updates commonly include several hundred new entries and thousands of revisions, allowing the dictionary to respond to language change much faster than print publication ever could. This rolling-update model marks a sharp break from the old cycle of editions decades apart, and it shows how modern dictionaries are made.

OED3 and the Ongoing Rewrite

Since the early 2000s, OED editors have been preparing a fully revised third edition, usually called OED3. The work involves re-examining every existing entry from the ground up. That is necessary because many entries still preserve wording written more than a hundred years ago, along with older scholarship, dated cultural assumptions, and editorial practices that no longer meet current standards.

The revision draws on modern corpus evidence, improved etymological work, and present-day editorial methods. Editors can now use vast digital collections of books, newspapers, and historical documents that earlier editors could not search. The revised entries are being released online only, and there are currently no plans for a printed third edition. For a dictionary of this size, digital publication offers flexibility that print cannot match.

The scale is immense. Hundreds of thousands of entries must be reviewed, with definitions, quotations, pronunciations, and word histories checked again. For that reason, OED3 is expected to take decades. It is one of the most ambitious revision projects in dictionary-making, fitting for a work that has shaped English lexicography since its first fascicle appeared in 1884.

What Makes the OED So Valuable

The Oxford English Dictionary matters because it records English as a living historical system, not just as a list of current meanings. Scholars rely on it because it documents vocabulary with a depth that no ordinary dictionary can match. Writers use it for precision, authority, and inspiration. Curious readers use it because almost every entry opens a small window onto how people have thought, worked, argued, joked, invented, and described their world.

It is also a remarkable example of sustained collaboration. From the Philological Society’s decision in 1857 to the present OED3 revision, the project has depended on editors, readers, scholars, printers, publishers, and volunteers over more than 160 years. Its ambition belongs with the great reference enterprises of modern intellectual life, such as the making of a comprehensive encyclopedia or the mapping of the human genome.

For anyone drawn to words—their origins, shades of meaning, and power to carry human experience—the Oxford English Dictionary remains the central resource. It shows that when language is documented carefully, the history of words becomes a history of the people who used them.