Launched by Richard Chenevix Trench's 1857 paper 'On Some Deficiencies in our English Dictionaries' (1857)
Delivered to the Philological Society in London, which then adopted the project in 1858
General knowledge · Words & language
The Oxford English Dictionary
Begun 1857; first edition 1884–1928
Lexicography — the historical dictionary of English
The principal historical record of the English language, tracing every word through dated quotations from its earliest known use. Proposed by the Philological Society in 1857 and edited for forty years by James Murray from a corrugated-iron shed he called the Scriptorium, it appeared in 125 instalments between 1884 and 1928 under the title A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles. The second edition of 1989 filled twenty volumes; a third edition, begun in 2000 and revised letter by letter, is expected to exist only online.
How to spot them
- ▸A historical dictionary built on dated quotations sent in by volunteer readers
- ▸James Murray, the Scriptorium, and its 1,029 pigeon-holes of slips
- ▸Originally A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles (the NED)
- ▸Twenty volumes in 1989; the third edition is being revised starting from M
Key facts
The first fascicle, covering A to Ant, published on 1 February 1884 for 12s 6d (1884)
352 pages; total sales were only about 4,000 copies
James Murray's corrugated-iron shed with 1,029 pigeon-holes for quotation slips
By 1880 some 2,500,000 slips had accumulated; 1,000 more arrived daily
Its most prolific volunteer reader turned out to be an inmate of Broadmoor
W. C. Minor, an American army surgeon confined after killing a man in London
The 125th and final instalment, Wise to the end of W, published on 19 April 1928 (1928)
Neither Murray (d. 1915) nor Bradley (d. 1923) lived to see it
'Bondmaid' was left out of the first edition because its slips were mislaid
It was restored in the 1933 supplement, along with appendicitis and radium
The verb 'set' once held its record for the longest entry, later beaten by 'run'
About 580 senses for set; run reached 645 senses when revised in 2011
Quick-fire facts
- •Work began in 1857; the original title was A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, abbreviated NED
- •The four editors of the first edition were James Murray, Henry Bradley, William Craigie and C. T. Onions
- •Murray was responsible for A–D, H–K, O–P and T, nearly half the finished work
- •The second edition (1989) ran to 20 volumes and 21,730 pages, with 291,500 entries
- •Shakespeare is the most-quoted single author and Hamlet his most-quoted work; George Eliot is the most-quoted woman
- •The most-quoted single work is the medieval poem Cursor Mundi; the Bible, across translations, is the most quoted overall
- •W. C. Minor's story was told in Simon Winchester's The Surgeon of Crowthorne (US title: The Professor and the Madman)
- •An electronic version appeared in 1988 and the online edition in 2000; the third edition is not expected to be printed
- •The dictionary is published by Oxford University Press, though the project began with the Philological Society, not the university
- •Radium was omitted from the 1903 fascicle, months before the Curies won the Nobel Prize in Physics
Drill it — 8 cards
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Sources
- Oxford University Press — History of the Oxford English Dictionary
- Simon Winchester — The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary