

The first edition of the Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca is the first great dictionary devoted to a modern European language (Italian) and was published in 1612 the first edition of Dictionnaire de l'Académie française dates from 1694. Another earlier large dictionary is the Grimm brothers' dictionary of the German language, begun in 1838 and completed in 1961. ĭespite its considerable size, the OED is neither the world's largest nor the earliest exhaustive dictionary of a language. As entries began to be revised for the OED3 in sequence starting from M, the record was progressively broken by the verbs make in 2000, then put in 2007, then run in 2011 with 645 senses. The longest entry in the OED2 was for the verb set, which required 60,000 words to describe some 580 senses (430 for the bare verb, the rest in phrasal verbs and idioms).


The dictionary's latest, complete print edition (second edition, 1989) was printed in 20 volumes, comprising 291,500 entries in 21,730 pages. 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. As of 30 November 2005, the Oxford English Dictionary contained approximately 301,100 main entries. Entries and relative size ĭiagram of the types of English vocabulary included in the OED, devised by James Murray, its first editor.Īccording to the publishers, it would take a single person 120 years to "key in" the 59 million words of the OED second edition, 60 years to proofread them, and 540 megabytes to store them electronically. This influenced later volumes of this and other lexicographical works. The forerunners to the OED, such as the early volumes of the Deutsches Wörterbuch, had initially provided few quotations from a limited number of sources, whereas the OED editors preferred larger groups of quite short quotations from a wide selection of authors and publications. The format of the OED 's entries has influenced numerous other historical lexicography projects.

Following each definition are several brief illustrating quotations presented in chronological order from the earliest ascertainable use of the word in that sense to the last ascertainable use for an obsolete sense, to indicate both its life span and the time since its desuetude, or to a relatively recent use for current ones.
