First part of the Oxford English Dictionary published
On this day · 1 February 1884
After decades of slips and false starts, the great dictionary finally appeared, and had only reached the word "ant."
On February 1, 1884, the first installment of what would become the Oxford English Dictionary went on sale. Conceived in 1857 by London’s Philological Society as a complete historical record of English, the project had crawled for decades before editor James Murray took charge in 1879.
This opening fascicle ran 352 pages and covered only A through “ant”, a single thin slice of the alphabet. Planners had imagined a four-volume work finished in a decade.
Instead, the full dictionary would take more than forty years.
Murray ran the effort from a corrugated-iron shed he called the Scriptorium, sorting a flood of quotation slips mailed in by volunteer readers. The 125th and final part appeared in 1928, completing a reference of over 400,000 words and phrases that remains the authoritative history of the English language.
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