Wright, Joseph (1 February 1898). "The English dialect dictionary, being the complete vocabulary of all dialect words still in use, or known to have been in use during the last two hundred years;". London [etc.]: H. Frowde; New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons – via the Internet Archive.

Gilliver, Peter; Marshall, Jeremy; Weiner, Edmund (2006), The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary (hardcover), Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-19-861069-4 Furnivall believed that, since many printed texts from earlier centuries were not readily available, it would be impossible for volunteers to efficiently locate the quotations that the dictionary needed. As a result, he founded the Early English Text Society in 1864 and the Chaucer Society in 1868 to publish old manuscripts. [19] :xii Furnivall's preparatory efforts lasted 21 years and provided numerous texts for the use and enjoyment of the general public, as well as crucial sources for lexicographers, but they did not actually involve compiling a dictionary. Furnivall recruited more than 800 volunteers to read these texts and record quotations. While enthusiastic, the volunteers were not well trained and often made inconsistent and arbitrary selections. Ultimately, Furnivall handed over nearly two tons of quotation slips and other materials to his successor. [21] Oxford University Press (2017). "Key to symbols and other conventional entries". Oxford English Dictionary online . Retrieved 28 October 2017. Oxford English Dictionary Additions Series. Vol.1. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1993. ISBN 978-0-19-861292-6. There were three possible ways to update it. The cheapest would have been to leave the existing work alone and simply compile a new supplement of perhaps one or two volumes, but then anyone looking for a word or sense and unsure of its age would have to look in three different places. The most convenient choice for the user would have been for the entire dictionary to be re-edited and retypeset, with each change included in its proper alphabetical place; but this would have been the most expensive option, with perhaps 15 volumes required to be produced. The OUP chose a middle approach: combining the new material with the existing supplement to form a larger replacement supplement.

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The OED lists British headword spellings (e.g., labour, centre) with variants following ( labor, center, etc.). For the suffix more commonly spelt -ise in British English, OUP policy dictates a preference for the spelling -ize, e.g., realize vs. realise and globalization vs. globalisation. The rationale is etymological, in that the English suffix is mainly derived from the Greek suffix -ιζειν, ( -izein), or the Latin -izāre. [87] However, -ze is also sometimes treated as an Americanism insofar as the -ze suffix has crept into words where it did not originally belong, as with analyse (British English), which is spelt analyze in American English. [88] [89] Reception and criticism [ edit ] When referencing the Oxford English Dictionary you find online, determine if it’s an archived version or not. If not, it means that the dictionary is continuously being updated. Willen Brown, Stephanie (26 August 2007). "From Unregistered Words to OED3". CogSci Librarian . Retrieved 23 October 2007– via BlogSpot. Brewer, Charlotte (2007), Treasure-House of the Language: the Living OED (hardcover), Yale University Press, ISBN 978-0-300-12429-3

If there are more than two authors, what you need to do is to focus on the first author in the list. The supplements and their integration into the second edition were a great improvement to the OED as a whole, but it was recognized that most of the entries were still fundamentally unaltered from the first edition. Much of the information in the dictionary published in 1989 was already decades out of date, though the supplements had made good progress towards incorporating new vocabulary. Yet many definitions contained disproven scientific theories, outdated historical information, and moral values that were no longer widely accepted. [48] [49] Furthermore, the supplements had failed to recognize many words in the existing volumes as obsolete by the time of the second edition's publication, meaning that thousands of words were marked as current despite no recent evidence of their use. [50]

The following is a brief history of the Oxford English Dictionary, detailing key events since the initial proposal in 1857. Accordingly, it was recognized that work on a third edition would have to begin to rectify these problems. [48] The first attempt to produce a new edition came with the Oxford English Dictionary Additions Series, a new set of supplements to complement the OED2 with the intention of producing a third edition from them. [51] The previous supplements appeared in alphabetical instalments, whereas the new series had a full A–Z range of entries within each individual volume, with a complete alphabetical index at the end of all words revised so far, each listed with the volume number which contained the revised entry. [51] Ogilvie, Sarah (2013), Words of the World: a global history of the Oxford English Dictionary (hardcover), Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-1107605695 Rachman, Tom (27 January 2014). "Deadline 2037: The Making of the Next Oxford English Dictionary". The Irish Times . Retrieved 27 August 2019.