Where did the Oxford English Dictionary originate?
The Oxford English Dictionary was first published in 1861 and is now considered one of the world’s best resources on the English language. However, the OED as it is often called originally was unconnected with a university, but was a project of the Philological Society in London, members of which were dissatisfied with available dictionaries of English. Herbert Coleridge, grandson of the famous poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, was a member (and also the OED’s first editor, although he died soon after the project began). The project began in 1857 when the Society formed an Unregistered Words Committee whose goal was to find words unlisted in existing dictionaries. However, they produced something a bit different – in fact, a small study, presented by member Richard Trench, entitled On Some Deficiencies in our English Dictionaries, which set forth seven main criticisms of existing dictionaries: 1. Incomplete coverage of obsolete words 2. Inconsistent coverage of families of related words 3.
