The
Oxford English Dictionary (
OED), published by the
Oxford University Press (OUP), is a comprehensive
dictionary of the
English language.
[2] Two fully-bound print editions of the
OED have been published under its current name, in 1928 and 1989; as of December 2008 the dictionary's current editors had completed a quarter of the third edition.
[3]According to the publishers, it would take a single person 120 years to type the 59 million words of the OED second edition, 60 years to proofread it, and 540 megabytes to store it electronically.[4] As of 30 November 2005, the Oxford English Dictionary contained approximately 301,100 main entries. Supplementing the entry headwords, there are 157,000 bold-type combinations and derivatives; 169,000 italicized-bold phrases and combinations; 616,500 word-forms in total, including 137,000 pronunciations; 249,300 etymologies; 577,000 cross-references; and 2,412,400 usage quotations. The dictionary's latest, complete print edition (Second Edition, 1989) was printed in 20 volumes, comprising 291,500 entries in 21,730 pages. The longest entry in the OED2 was for the verb set, which required 60,000 words to describe some 430 senses. As entries began to be revised for the OED3 in sequence starting from M, the longest entry became make in 2000, then put in 2007.[5]
Despite its impressive size, the OED is neither the world's largest nor earliest dictionary. The Dutch dictionary Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal, which has similar aims to the OED, is the largest and it took twice as long to complete. The earliest large dictionary is the Grimm brothers' dictionary of the German language, begun in 1838 and completed in 1961. The first edition of the Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca, which is the first great dictionary devoted to a modern European language (Italian), was published in 1612; the first edition of Dictionnaire de l'Académie française dates from 1694. The first edition of the official dictionary of Spanish, the Diccionario de la lengua española (produced, edited, and published by the Real Academia Española) was published in 1780. The Kangxi dictionary of Chinese was published even earlier, in 1716.
The OED's official policy is to attempt to record a word's most-known usages and variants in all varieties of English past and present, worldwide. Per the 1933 "Preface"
