A PowerPoint looking at the history of Samuel Johnson's dictionary and The Oxford English Dictionary.

2. The Oxford English Dictionary "a-Ant" was first published in February t 1884. Its main intention was to record every
word used in the English language since 1150 and trace it back through all its shifting meanings, spellings and uses
to its earliest recorded appearance.
James Augustus Henry (1837-1915) took it upon himself to undertake the task of completing the dictionary. He was
a Scottish-born bank clerk who at that time would have been an unlikely choice. Murray. He got his eleven children
involved in sifting through several million slips of paper.
He believed the work would take about 12 years and cover 6400 pages. The whole project took more than four
decades and 15,000 densely printed pages. Hundreds of volunteers helped with the research, sending entries from
all over the world.
James PLATT specialized in obscure words, yet he had never owned a book. He worked for his father in the City and
each lunch-time borrowed one book from the British Museum Reading Room. He scoured through it and replaced it
the next day with another book. On weekends he wonder London's dens and dockyard pubs looking for native
speakers of obscure tongues whom he questioned on small points of semantics.
It is perhaps the greatest work ever produced. No other language has anything remotely deatailed as The Oxford
English Dictionary. Due to its existence, more is known about the history of English than any other language in the
world.
To this day the Oxford English Dictionary is being republished every couple of years to the ever changing and
developing nature of the English language. They have also started to bring out other languages in the form of the
Oxford English Dictionary , to help us learn the specifics of that language. Just like the Oxford English Dictionary the
variety of language ones are also being republished frequently.

3.
Samuel Johnson was blind in one eye, had an incomplete education, and was
from a poor background. He was given the contract by the London publisher
Robert Dodsley. His finished dictionary contained - many inconsistencies.
The dictionary was published on 15 April 1755. It was not the first such dictionary,
but was the most important at that time. In Johnson's lifetime five further editions
were published, and a sixth came out when he died.
The Industrial Revolution contributed to the huge number of advances in
technological and scientific vocabulary that we still use today and is presented in
the Oxford English Dictionary.
This was import in the standardisation of word meaning and spellings. During the
Late Modern English period , regional differences in the way English was used
declined. As education improved caused an improvement in communications
caused many dialect words and expressions to be replaced by standard English
vocabulary .

4. • Samuel Johnson’s dictionary was finally published in April 1755
• It contained 42,773 entries
• The pages were nearly 18 inches (46cm) tall and the book was
20 inches (51cm) wide when opened.
• The dictionary cost £4.10, which in modern day currency is
equivalent to £350.
• Johnson claimed he could complete the book within three years.
However, it actually took a total of nine years to finish the
Dictionary.
• Although, Johnson’s dictionary was not the very first dictionary, it
was the most widely used for 173 years, up until the publication
of the Oxford Dictionary. The Oxford Dictionary was published in
1928.

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The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) was published by the Oxford University
Press and is by far the largest dictionary of the English language to have ever
been published.
It is still being updated with words to the present day.
Work began on the OED in 1857.
It began publishing in serials/volumes/issues in 1884 under the title of “A New
Dictionary on Historical Principles; Founded Mainly on the Materials Collected
by The Philological Society.”
It was in 1895 that the title “The Oxford English Dictionary” was first used
unofficially on the front covers of its serials
In 1928 the full dictionary was republished in ten bound volumes.
In 1989 a second edition was published in twenty volumes.
As of 24th March 2011, the third edition of the OED contains 750,000 words.
According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the OED is the “world’s most
comprehensive single-language print dictionary.”

6. • The very first electronic version of the dictionary
was made available in 1988.
• The online version of the OED has been
available since 2000.
• As of August 2010, the ‘e-dictionary’ has been
receiving two million visits per month from
paying subscribers.
• Nigel Portwood, chief executive of the Oxford
University Press, feels that the third edition of
the OED may never be printed.

7. • The very first electronic version of the dictionary
was made available in 1988.
• The online version of the OED has been
available since 2000.
• As of August 2010, the ‘e-dictionary’ has been
receiving two million visits per month from
paying subscribers.
• Nigel Portwood, chief executive of the Oxford
University Press, feels that the third edition of
the OED may never be printed.