Alot to Cover

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In 1857 a project began at the Philological Society of London to document the English language. This would be going back to Anglo-Saxon times around 1000 CE which was a lot to cover. The Oxford English Dictionary that was created by this project contained not just words but their definitions and detailed information on the words' history and usage, even obsolete ones. A committee was also established to collect words that didn't appear in dictionaries at that time. In 1879 the Oxford University Press came on to publish the dictionary and finance it. In 1884 the first part came out. It only covered the words "A" through "ant". The last part of the dictionary didn't come out until April 19, 1928. The original plan was for the dictionary to contain 6,400 pages over four volumes. It turned out to have 12 volumes with 15,487 pages covering 414,825 words. Today it has more than 600,000 entries. New words and their histories are added regularly. I have always marveled at the English language and I thought this was amazing.