13 Facts About OED

OED then approached James Murray, who accepted the post of editor.

OED invented his own quotation-tracking system, allowing him to submit slips on specific words in response to editors' requests.

The story of how Murray and Minor worked together to advance the OED was retold in the 1998 book The Surgeon of Crowthorne, which was the basis for a 2019 film, The Professor and the Madman, starring Mel Gibson and Sean Penn.

OED tracked and regathered Furnivall's collection of quotation slips, which were found to concentrate on rare, interesting words rather than common usages.

OED appealed, through newspapers distributed to bookshops and libraries, for readers who would report "as many quotations as you can for ordinary words" and for words that were "rare, obsolete, old-fashioned, new, peculiar or used in a peculiar way".

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Content of the OED2 is mostly just a reorganization of the earlier corpus, but the retypesetting provided an opportunity for two long-needed format changes.

Murray had devised his own notation for pronunciation, there being no standard available at the time, whereas the OED2 adopted the modern International Phonetic Alphabet.

OED retired in 2013 and was replaced by Michael Proffitt, who is the eighth chief editor of the dictionary.

In 1971, the 13-volume OED1 was reprinted as a two-volume Compact Edition, by photographically reducing each page to one-half its linear dimensions; each compact edition page held four OED1 pages in a four-up format.

The online database containing the OED2 is updated quarterly with revisions that will be included in the OED3 .

The OED website is not optimized for mobile devices, but the developers have stated that there are plans to provide an API to facilitate the development of interfaces for querying the OED.

The original edition, mostly based on the OED1, was edited by Francis George Fowler and Henry Watson Fowler and published in 1911, before the main work was completed.

Once NODE was published, a similarly brand-new edition of the Concise Oxford Dictionary followed, this time based on an abridgement of NODE rather than the OED; NODE continues to be principal source for Oxford's product line of current-English dictionaries, including the New Oxford American Dictionary, with the OED now only serving as the basis for scholarly historical dictionaries.