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'The ultimate authority on the English
language as well as a history of English speech and thought from its infancy
to the present day' - The Times
'The greatest work in dictionary making ever undertaken' - New York Times
'The greatest continuing work of scholarship that this century has produced'
- Newsweek
'The gigantic total picture of the English language...an epic achievement'
- The Observer
'The greatest dictionary in any language' - Daily Telegraph |
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The 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary is the accepted authority
on the evolution of the English language over the last millennium.
It is an unsurpassed guide to the meaning, history, and pronunciation
of over half a million words, both present and past. The OED has
a unique historical focus. Accompanying each definition is a chronologically
arranged group of quotations that trace the usage of words, and
show the contexts in which they can be used. The quotations are
drawn from a huge variety of international sources - literary, scholarly,
technical, popular - and represent authors as disparate as Geoffrey
Chaucer and Erica Jong, William Shakespeare and Raymond Chandler,
Charles Darwin and John Le Carré. In all, nearly 2.5 million
quotations can be found in the OED.
The OED covers words from across the English-speaking world, from
North America to South Africa, from Australia and New Zealand to
the Caribbean. It also offers the best in etymological analysis,
listings of variant spellings, and shows pronunciation using the
International Phonetic Alphabet.
The Second Edition of the OED is currently available as a 20-volume
print edition, on CD-ROM, and now also online. Updated quarterly
with at least 1000 new and revised entries, OED Online offers unparalleled
access to the 'greatest continuing work of scholarship that this
century has produced' (Newsweek).
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| Dictionary
Facts |
| Second Edition (1989) |
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| Size: |
20 volumes, 21,730 pages |
| Publication date: |
1989 |
| Weight of text: |
62.6 kilos or 137.72 lbs. |
| Amount of ink used to print complete run: |
2,830 kilos or 6,243 lbs. |
| Number of words in entire text: |
59 million |
| Number of printed characters: |
350 million |
Number of different typographical
characters used in text: |
approx.: 750 (660 special
plus approx. 90 on regular keyboard) |
| Equivalent person years used to 'key
in' text to convert to machine-readable form: |
120 |
| Equivalent person years to proof-read text: |
60 |
| Number of megabytes of electronic storage required
for text: |
540 |
| Number of entries: |
291,500 |
| Number of main entries: |
231,100 |
| Number of main entries for obsolete words: |
47,100 |
| Number of main entries for spurious words: |
240 |
| Number of main entries for non-naturalized words: |
12,200 |
| Longest entry in Dictionary: |
the verb 'set' with over
430 senses consisting of approximately 60,000 words or 326,000
characters |
| Number of quotations: |
2,436,600 |
Most frequently quoted work
(in various full and partial version, and translations): |
Bible (est. 25,000 quotations) |
| Most frequently quoted single author: |
Shakespeare (approx. 33,300 quotations) |
| Most frequently quoted single work of Shakespeare: |
Hamlet (almost 1,600 quotations) |
Percentage of quotations by centuries:
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20th century - 20 per cent
19th century - 31
18th century - 11
17th century - 16
16th century - 10
15th century - 4.5
14th century - 3.5
13th century - 1
1st to 12th centuries - 1
Undated (see note) - 0.5 |
Note: 'Undated' includes approximately 1,250 quotations from
Beowulf, with the balance consisting of proverbs, nursery
rhymes, 'made up' illustrations, and references to the appearance
of word forms 'in mod. Dicts.'
All the above figures should be regarded as approximate.
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