Founding editor James Murray was also reluctant to include scientific terms, despite their documentation, unless he felt that they were widely enough used. After the Second World War, Oxford University Press decided to re-establish the headquarters of the OED and embark upon the revision of the 1933 Supplement.

Richard Chenevix Trench (1807–1886) played the key role in the project's first months, but his appointment as Dean of Westminster meant that he could not give the dictionary project the time that it required. Murray was a self-taught scholar from the lowlands of Scotland who had showed an interest in language from a very early age. 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 (under the new title of the Oxford Dictionary of English, or ODE) 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.During the 1870s, the Philological Society was concerned with the process of publishing a dictionary with such an immense scope.

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. In the 1870s, Furnivall unsuccessfully attempted to recruit both Henry Sweet and Henry Nicol to succeed him. As a historical dictionary, the OED is very different from those of current English, in which the focus is on present-day meanings. Oxford English Dictionary Additions Series Volume 1 ( ISBN 978-0-19-861292-6): Includes over 20,000 illustrative quotations showing the evolution of each word or meaning.The 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. With hundreds of staff, thousands of contributors, and more than 500,000 defined words at its core, the story of this extraordinary living document is revealed below. xiii He tracked and regathered Furnivall's collection of quotation slips, which were found to concentrate on rare, interesting words rather than common usages. In 1933, Oxford had finally put the dictionary to rest; all work ended, and the quotation slips went into storage. In 1987 a CD-ROM of the First Edition was produced, and in 1992 the Second Edition was also published on a single compact disc – a great contrast to the hefty twenty-volume work that took up four feet of shelf space and weighed 150 pounds!

The Concise Oxford Dictionary is a different work, which aims to cover current English only, without the historical focus.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.