Oxford English Dictionary

The Oxford English Dictionary is the primary reference work on the English language and its evolution. It spans twenty printed volumes, but is also available on CD-ROM and over the Internet. It was originally planned by the Philological Society of London in 1857 to take ten years, but the first volume was not published until 1884. The completion of all the volumes took until 1928. In 1933, the first Supplement was published. In the 1980s, it was digitised using SGML.