Happy Birthday to the Oxford English Dictionary

The massive, 20-volume resource took 70 years from start to completion, and its first volume was published this week in 1884. Happy birthday to the Oxford English Dictionary!

Boy, those English really are something. It seems they have a different word for practically everything.

And the mother lode of English words, the premiere resource for words and their meanings, marks an anniversary this week. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) made its debut on February 1, 1884.

Begun nearly 30 years before the first volumes were published, the OED came about through the efforts of a group of Oxford University professors who saw a need for a dictionary that was more comprehensive and accurate than anything then available. Editors and volunteer participants began the process of creating and collecting definitions, etymology, and usage on individual slips of paper.

By 1882, the editors had collected 3,500,000 individual slips, which set the stage for the 1884 release on this date of the OED's first fascicle (and yes, I had to look that one up; it means a section of a book that is published in parts). The original publication went to the bookstore shelves as A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles; Founded Mainly on the Materials Collected by The Philological Society and it included definitions of words from A to Ant. By 1895, eleven fascicles were complete, and the new name of Oxford English Dictionary was adopted. It would take another three decades to complete the monumental task, with the publishing of the 125th and final fascicle in 1928.

In its present form, the OED comprises a whopping 20 volumes containing approximately 300,000 entries. It's estimated that it would take a single person 120 years to type and 60 years to proof read. As staggering as this may seem, the OED is not the world largest dictionary. That distinction goes to the Dutch equivalent of the OED, which contains more than 400,000 entries in over 40 volumes.

Photo courtesy of Cofrin Library via flickr