Nothing beats the Oxford dictionary for describing the English language. People respect it a great deal.

The Oxford dictionary first appeared over 100 years ago. It began in London in 1857. A society of word experts believed the dictionaries of the time were lacking. They began from step one to look at the language. Little did they know the size of the project they had just undertaken.

The Oxford dictionary got its official start in 1879 when Oxford University Press began working on it. The name was to be the New English Dictionary. It was planned to be four volumes, 6400 pages. It would go back as far as 1150 AD. They had a ten year time line.

Five years into the creation of this early version of the Oxford dictionary they had only reached the word ant. Clearly they were behind schedule. Part of the reason that it was taking so long was that the English language constantly evolves. Words kept changing even as they wrote their entries, so they were constantly revising. That's not easy while looking at seven centuries of language

For four decades work on the Oxford dictionary continued. Additional editors joined the team. The dictionary had expanded from the original concept of four volumes to 10 volumes. It had over 400,000 entries. When finished it was the final source for information about English. It only took 40 years to complete.

Immediately they set about revising the Oxford dictionary. In 1933 a supplement was published in the dictionary had expanded to 12 volumes. 1957 was the next major change. That work went on until 1972 when four more volumes were added.

The Oxford dictionary entered a new age in 1982. It was all moved to an electronic format. They spent over 13 million dollars to make this happen. It took five years to complete. In 1989 a second edition was published. It's 22,000 pages over 20 volumes.

Now the Oxford dictionary is available on the Internet. It's come a long way from a simple idea.