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And then, as glasses were clinked, cigars were lit and lucifers put away, chairs pushed back from the long tables, and a hush was demanded, so from the centre of the high table rose the slightly less than commanding figure of the celebration dinner's most celebrated guest, the Right Honourable Stanley Baldwin, PC, MP, the nation's three-term Conservative Prime Minister...

He was there for no less a task than to propose a formal Toast of Gratitude and Admiration to the Editors and Staff of what was to be formally and unforgettably called The Oxford English Dictionary–for the twelve mighty tombstone-sized volumes were now, and after 70 long years of terrible labour, fully and finally complete. The first two sets had been made and formally presented: one had gone to King George V, the other to the American President, Calvin Coolidge. Downing Street had been obliged to purchase its own official set for Mr Baldwin–and rarely, he later said, did a day go by when he did not consult it.

In 15,490 pages of single-spaced printed text, and at long, long last, all 414,825 words that the then Editor-in-Chief, Professor Sir William Craigie –this Derby Day newly knighted, and newly blessed with an honorary degree (which Oxford had bestowed on him the day before) and now positively beaming with pride from his place to the Prime Minister's left –all the words which Sir William and his colleagues had amassed and catalogued and listed and annotated and which were thus far in their sum reckoned to make up all that was then known of the English language, had now been fully and properly defined, their preferred and variant and obsolete spellings all listed, their etymologies all recorded, their pronunciations suggested, required, or demanded.

There were in addition no fewer than 1,827,306 illustrative quotations listed –selected from five million offered by thousands of volunteer readers and literary woolgatherers –that showed just how and when the uses and senses and meanings of all of these words had begun and evolved and then, in the nature of the English language, had steadily and ineluctably reshaped and reworked themselves. These were essential: the millions of words from these quotations offer up countless examples of exactly how the language worked over the centuries of its employment, and by their use they mark the OED out as the finest dictionary ever made in any language, and made, as it happens, of the language that is the most important in the world, and probably will be for all time.

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