Prompt Cast
The Creation and Evolution of the Oxford English Dictionary
TLDR The Oxford English Dictionary was created by the London Philological Society to address the shortcomings of existing dictionaries. Despite facing numerous challenges and delays, the dictionary has undergone multiple editions and updates and is expected to be complete in 2037 with 600,000 entries.
Timestamped Summary
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The creation of the Oxford English Dictionary was an ambitious project that aimed to provide not only definitions and spellings, but also a complete history of each word and where it came from.
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The London Philological Society aimed to create a new comprehensive dictionary that would solve the problems they saw in current dictionaries, including a lack of coverage of obsolete words, histories of words, synonyms of words, and poor examples and illustrations of words.
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In 1858, the Philological Society called for the creation of a new dictionary, which eventually fell into disarray under the editorship of Herbert Coleridge and Frederick James Fernival before being handed off to James Murray.
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James Murray took over the project and improved the organization and editing, but the volume of information was so vast that the original ten-year deadline was impossible to meet.
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Dr. William Miner, a patient at the Broadmoor Asylum, made significant contributions to the dictionary, and despite his condition, he became friends with James Murray, who eventually published the first volume in 1884 and hired Henry Bradley as his assistant.
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The Oxford English Dictionary has undergone multiple editions and updates, including the digitization of the second edition and the ongoing release of periodic updates for the third edition.
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The third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary is expected to be complete in 2037, will double the size of the dictionary, and currently has 600,000 entries with new ones added each year.
