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( Oxford English Dictionary)
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED), published by the Oxford University Press (OUP), is a comprehensive dictionary of the English language.[1] It should not be confused with the one-volume Oxford Dictionary of English, formerly New Oxford Dictionary of English, published in 1998. According to the publishers, it would take a person 120 years to type the 59 million words of the OED second edition, 60 years to proofread it, and 540 megabytes to electronically store it.[2] As of 30 November 2005, the Oxford English Dictionary contained approximately 301,100 main entries. 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. The dictionary's latest, complete print edition (Second Edition, 1989) was printed in 20 volumes, comprising 291,500 entries in 21,730 pages. The longest entry in the OED2 was for the verb set, which required 60,000 words to describe some 430 senses. As entries began to be revised for the OED3 in sequence starting from M, the longest entry became make in 2000, then put in 2007.[1] Set is expected to regain its place as the longest entry once it too is revised. While large, the OED is not the world's largest dictionary, nor is it the earliest large dictionary. The Dutch dictionary Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal, which has similar aims to the OED, is the largest and it took twice as long to complete. The earliest large dictionary was the Grimm brothers' dictionary of the German language which they began in 1838 and which was finished in 1961. The first edition of Dictionnaire de l'Académie française dates from 1694, the first edition of the official dictionary of Spanish, the Diccionario de la lengua española (produced, edited, and published by the Real Academia Española) was published in 1780. The Kangxi dictionary of Chinese was even earlier, published in 1716. However, none of these other dictionaries has had as broad a cultural impact as the OED. The OEDs official policy was to attempt to record a word's most-known usages and variants in all varieties of English past and present, world-wide. Per the 1933 "Preface"
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