The Dictionary That Took Seventy Years

In 1879, the Philological Society of London hired James Murray, a Scottish schoolteacher, to edit a new dictionary that would document every word in the English language with quotations showing its first use and how its meaning had drifted. He set up a corrugated-iron shed in his garden — the Scriptorium — and started.

Murray relied on a network of volunteer readers. They were sent printed slips and asked to mail back quotations from books, periodicals, and old manuscripts, one slip per word per usage. By the 1880s the slips were arriving in barrels. One of the most prolific contributors, William Chester Minor, sent in tens of thousands of quotations from his cell at Broadmoor, where he had been committed after killing a man in a paranoid episode. Murray didn't learn that for years.

The first fascicle, A to Ant, came out in 1884 — five years in. The full first edition wasn't completed until 1928, twelve volumes, more than 400,000 entries. Murray had died thirteen years earlier, mid-letter T.

The project's defining choice was descriptive, not prescriptive. The OED records how English is actually used, with the historical evidence to prove it. A word's entry is essentially a small biography: when it appeared, who used it, what it meant in 1450 versus 1850 versus last Tuesday.

The dictionary is now permanently online and continuously revised. The original premise — that you cannot define a living word without showing it in motion — turned out to be the only honest way to do the job.