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84 years of Dictionaries’ … what’s next??

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      
The Oxford English Dictionary "a-Ant" was first published in February  1884.  Its main intention was to record every word used in the English language since 1150 and trace it back through all its shifting meanings, spellings and uses to its earliest recorded appearance.

 James Augustus Henry (1837-1915) took it upon himself to undertake the task of completing the dictionary.  He was a Scottish-born bank clerk who at that time would have been an unlikely choice. Murray. He got his eleven children involved in sifting through several million slips of paper.He believed the work would take about 12 years and cover 6400 pages. The whole project took more than four decades and 15,000 densely printed pages. Hundreds of volunteers helped with the research, sending entries from all over the world. It is perhaps the greatest work ever produced. No other language has anything remotely detailed as The Oxford English Dictionary. Due to its existence, more is known about the history of English than any other language in the world.  

The Industrial Revolution contributed to the huge number of advances in technological and scientific vocabulary that we still use today and is presented in the Oxford English Dictionary. This was import in the standardisation of word meaning and spellings. During the Late Modern English period, regional differences in the way English was used declined. As education improved caused an improvement in communications caused many dialect words and expressions to be replaced by Standard English vocabulary.

Samuel Johnson was blind in one eye, had an incomplete education, and was from a poor background. He was given the contract by the London publisher Robert Dodsley. His finished dictionary contained - many inconsistencies. The dictionary was published on 15 April 1755. It was not the first such dictionary, but was the most important at that time. In Johnson's lifetime five further editions were published, and a sixth came out when he died. Samuel Johnson’s dictionary was finally published in April 1755 , it contained  42,773 entries, the pages were nearly 18 inches (46cm) tall and the book was 20 inches (51cm) wide when opened. The dictionary cost £4.10, which in modern day currency is equivalent to £350. Johnson claimed he could complete the book within three years. However, it actually took a total of nine years to finish the Dictionary. Although, Johnson’s dictionary was not the very first dictionary, it was the most widely used for 173 years, up until the publication of the Oxford English Dictionary which was published in 1928.

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) was published by the Oxford University Press and is by far the largest dictionary of the English language to have ever been published.It is still being updated with words to the present day.Work began on the OED in 1857.It was in 1895 that the title “The Oxford English Dictionary” was first used unofficially on the front covers of its serials. In 1928 the full dictionary was republished in ten bound volumes. In 1989 a second edition was published in twenty volumes. As of 24th March 2011, the third edition of the OED contains 750,000 words. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the OED is the “world’s most comprehensive single-language print dictionary.”

To make the Dictionary more accessible to the public they made the Dictionary electronic. The very first electronic version of the dictionary was made available in 1988.The online version of the OED has been available since 2000.As of August 2010, the ‘e-dictionary’ has been receiving two million visits per month from paying subscribers.