The Oxford English Dictionary (Second Edition)

‘The greatest dictionary in any language’ Daily Telegraph

The 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary is the accepted authority on the evolution of the English language over the last millennium. It is an unsurpassed guide to the meaning, history, and pronunciation of over half a million words, both present and past.

The OED has a unique historical focus. Accompanying each definition is a chronologically arranged group of quotations that trace the usage of words, and show the contexts in which they can be used.

The quotations are drawn from a huge variety of international sources - literary, scholarly, technical, popular - and represent authors as disparate as Geoffrey Chaucer and Erica Jong, William Shakespeare and Raymond Chandler, Charles Darwin and John Le Carré. In all, nearly 2.5 million quotations can be found in the OED.

‘The gigantic total picture of the English language...an epic achievement’ The Observer

Other features distinguishing the entries in the Dictionary are:

• authoritative definitions of over 500,000 words
• detailed information on pronunciation using the International Phonetic Alphabet
• listings of variant spellings used throughout each word's history
• extensive treatment of etymology
• details of area of usage and of any regional characteristics (including geographical origins)

The Second Edition integrates the original OED with the four volumes of the Supplement. Published between 1972 and 1986, the Supplement was produced to bring the Dictionary up to date, to extend its coverage to the language of the mid-20th century, and to reflect the ever-broadening international nature of the English. In addition to merging the original OED and the Supplement, which greatly enhances the convenience of using the Dictionary, the Second Edition includes 5,000 new words and meanings.

‘The OED has been to me a teacher, a companion, a source of endless discovery. I could not have become a writer without it. I welcome it in its new and comprehensive form, with its supplements absorbed into its main body, with its employment of a scientific phonetic notation that supersedes the brilliant but quirky system of Murray, with its astonishing panorama of what English is and what is has been. There will be no greater publishing event this century than the appearance of the new OED.’ Anthony Burgess