‘A decade ago we could barely imagine how the Internet could benefit dictionary-making - the first years of the new millennium could see us really reaping those benefits.’ John Simpson, Chief Editor of the Oxford English Dictionary
In March 2000 the Oxford English Dictionary Online became available
on the world-wide web at www.oed.com.
The Dictionary is made up of 60 million words of text, and describes nearly
750,000 terms used in English over the past thousand years. The defined words
are illustrated by more than 2.4 million quotations—in a format developed for
easy accessibility.
The OED Online represents the initial findings of the twenty-year, £35 million project to revise the Oxford English Dictionary. The first 4,350 entries to have been fully revised and updated are already available, alongside the 9,000-plus new words and senses drafted over the last decade and now included within the Dictionary for the first time.
The ongoing revision process began with entries in the letter M. Quarterly updates of at least 1,000 words will be released online during the next decade until the whole Dictionary has been revised.
More information about OED Online and the revision project: