The OED
It came from all kinds... Professor Murray contributed many years and Dr. Minor contributed thousands of words and quotations. Tens of thousands of men and women contributed in all, and of course, we can't talk about them all. But, from those 70 years of hard labor and long hours, there came "414,825 precise definitions." It's hard to imagine so many words. They're big and small; some seem important, while others seem irrelevant. They're all there, providing a better understanding of our language and literature in all its immensity and diversity.But, in this work, we are caught up in the whole story, the tale from beginning to end, and even before that, when Samuel Johnson first created his dictionary. It's hard to imagine a time when we didn't have any kind of dictionary, any collection of words and language. As Winchester writes, "Four hundred years ago there was no such convenience available on any English bookshelf."
Besides being a tribute to the professor, the madman, and the OED, this work is a tribute to all English literature, where we can find such a bounty of words to be discovered. And now, we have Simon Winchester to tie all of the pieces together.
