James Murray, First Editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, courtesy Wikipedia.
The first book generally regarded as the first English dictionary was written as Robert Cawdrey, a schoolmaster and former Church of England clergyman. In 1604 Cawdrey made use of wordlists published earlier in educational texts, such as Richard Mulcaster’s Elementary (1582) and Edmund Coote’s English Schoole-maister (1596).
Publication date: 1884-1928 in 128 fascicles. Published in 10 volumes in 1928 and reissued in 12 volumes in 1933, with addition of one-volume Supplement
Proposed size: 4 volumes, 6,400 pages (with provision for ‘a larger dictionary containing not fewer than 10 volumes, each containing not less than 1,600 pages)
Actual size: 10 volumes, 15,490 pages
Proposed time to complete: 10 years
Actual time to complete: 70 years (from approval date)
Longest entry in Dictionary: the verb ‘set’ with over 430 senses consisting of approximately 60,000 words or 326,000 characters
Most frequently quoted work (in various full and partial version, and translations): Bible (est. 25,000 quotations)
Most frequently quoted single author: Shakespeare (approx. 33,300 quotations)
Most frequently quoted single work of Shakespeare: Hamlet (almost 1,600 quotations)
1919 J. R. R. Tolkien joins the NED for a little over a year, working on words beginning with W.
1972 The first volume of the new Supplement appears, complete with the two strongest ‘four-letter words’, which had been omitted from the First Edition and Supplement.
1989 The second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED2) appears in print as 20 volumes containing 21,728 pages and defines over half a million words.
2000 OED Online is launched.
2015 The OED currently defines more than 627,000 lexical items, with around 844,000 separate senses, illustrated by over 3.5 million quotations drawn from over 1,000 years of the written history of English.
The OED is updated four times a year, every March, June, September, and December.
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