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Help with the Oxford English Dictionary

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Why is the Oxford English Dictionary Different?

600,000 words … 3.5 million quotations … over 1000 years of English

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is widely regarded as the accepted authority on the English language. It is an unsurpassed guide to the meaning, history, and pronunciation of 600,000 words— past and present—from across the English-speaking world.

As a historical dictionary, the OED is very different from Dictionaries of current English, in which the focus is on present-day meanings. You’ll still find present-day meanings in the OED, but you’ll also find the history of individual words, and of the language—traced through 3 million quotations, from classic literature and specialist periodicals to film scripts and cookery books.

The OED started life more than 150 years ago. Today, the dictionary is in the process of its first major revision. Updates revise and extend the OED at regular intervals, each time subtly adjusting our image of the English language.

 

chart of word types in oxford english dictionary common literary colloquial scientific foreign dialect technical
Diagram of the types of English vocabulary included in the OED, devised by James Murray, its first editor.   PD