Thanks to the votes of the English public, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) has been voted an icon of England (ICONS Online; project commissioned by the British government). It’s now as English as fish and chips (British English for “as American as apple pie”). The combo of fish and chips was also voted in, along with Monty Python, Sherlock Holmes, and many other bits of “Anglicana.”
It couldn’t happen to a nicer (expanding from) twenty-volume English dictionary on historical principles. The citations of word usage over the centuries make it a tremendous resource. The folks at the OED were happy about the honor, too. However, they should have said that “words can not describe how happy we are.”
The first edition was released in parts from 1884 to 1928 [timeline]. The 1989 second edition, according to my then-unimpressed English professor, was just about computerizing the data, merging all the supplements into the main body, and adding a few thousand new entries. The third edition will be a complete revision and massive expansion, perhaps not even to be put into book form. They started in the middle of the alphabet with the M’s in 2000. Three years later they started the N’s. As of this past June, they were halfway through the P’s, plus updates across the alphabet. You can track their progress with the quarterly updates.
I’m glad people are living longer because I want to see this thing finished. You don’t have to wait until it’s finished to use it, however. If you subscribe to the online version, you get access to the second edition and the third-edition drafts.
Oh, and you can help them find earlier (antedating), in-between (interdating), or later (postdating) published uses of words.
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