Facts About Oxford English Dictionary

Oxford English Dictionary contains full entries for 171,476 words in current use, and 47,156 obsolete words. Among these the word ‘Set’ has 464 definitions in the Oxford English Dictionary. The word ‘Run’ runs a distant second, with 396.

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is published by the Oxford University Press. Oxford University Press is the largest university press in the world. It is a department of the University of Oxford and is governed by a group of 15 academics appointed by the Vice-Chancellor known as the Delegates of the Press.

Two fully-bound print editions of the OED have been published under its current name, in 1928 and 1989. , the editors had completed the third edition up to Hh.
According to the publishers, it would take a single person 120 years to type the 59 million words of the OED second edition, 60 years to proofread it, and 540 megabytes to store it electronically.

Despite its impressive size, the OED is neither the world’s largest nor earliest dictionary. The Dutch dictionary Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal is a dictionary of the Dutch language and the largest dictionary in the world in print. It has over 430,000 entries of Dutch words from 1500 to 1921 and the paper edition consists of 43 volumes and close to 50,000 pages which has similar aims to the OED, is the largest and it took twice as long to complete.

The earliest large dictionary is the Grimm brothers’ dictionary of the German language.The Deutsches Wörterbuch is one of the most important dictionaries of the German language. It is for German what the Oxford English Dictionary is for English, containing detailed historical information about the origin and use over time of German words, with examples taken from actual documents.