Oxford English Dictionary Took 70 Years to Complete

When the Philological Society of London first conceived of a new dictionary in 1857, they vastly underestimated the task ahead. The project's revolutionary ambition was the primary reason its initial ten-year timeline ballooned into a seventy-year endeavor. Unlike previous dictionaries that simply listed definitions, the goal here was to create a comprehensive biography for every single word, tracing its origin, evolution, and shifting meanings over centuries. This required an unprecedented level of historical research, tracking each word's usage through a vast collection of literary and historical texts.

To accomplish this monumental task, the editors, most famously James Murray, pioneered what was essentially a massive 19th-century crowdsourcing project. They issued a public appeal for volunteer readers to scour books for notable words and mail them to the editors on small slips of paper. Millions of these quotation slips poured in