Completion of the Oxford English Dictionary

The completion of the Oxford English Dictionary, announced on New Year’s Eve, 1927, brought a decades-long undertaking to its first full conclusion: the alphabet was exhausted, and the complete text was in the printers’ hands. Its scale made the finished dictionary more than a reference work. It was the accumulated labor of many contributors, including William Chester Minor, whose thousands of quotations helped give the book its historical reach.

Announcement and Completion

The announcement came on New Year’s Eve, 1927. The next morning, a Sunday, The New York Times placed the news on its front page, reporting that the inclusion of the old Kentish word zyxt—the local form of the second-person singular present of the verb to see—marked the end of the alphabet and the completion of the text. The dictionary had taken another eight years to finish after Minor’s death; its completion therefore arrived without the contributor whose work had formed a substantial part of it.

Scale and Collective Labor

The completed work comprised twelve volumes, with 414,825 words defined and 1,827,306 illustrative quotations. Minor alone had contributed scores of thousands of those quotations, making his contribution one of the largest within a project built from the evidence and efforts of a broad community of readers and scholars.

The physical figures make the labor tangible. The handset type, printed by letterpress, ran to 178 miles—roughly the distance from London to the outskirts of Manchester. Discounting spaces and punctuation, the work contained 227,779,589 letters and numbers. The book’s achievement lay not only in its size but in the sustained accumulation and arrangement of evidence that size represented.

A Finished Work That Kept Growing

Completion did not make the dictionary static. One word, bondmaid, which appears in Johnson’s Dictionary, had been mislaid and was found only after the fascicle covering Battentlie–Bozzom had appeared. It was included, along with tens of thousands of words that had emerged or changed during the forty-four years of compilation, in a supplement published in 1933. Four further supplements followed between 1972 and 1986.

In 1989, Oxford University Press issued a fully integrated second edition in twenty slimmer volumes, incorporating the supplements. The dictionary was subsequently adapted for CD-ROM and online use, while a third edition was under way. Its history thus continued beyond the moment when the original text reached the printers: completion established a foundation for ongoing revision rather than closing the record of English words.

Reception and Significance

The scale of the finished dictionary invited descriptions of it as one of the great achievements of printing and as a literary romance. The book’s own history supports both responses: its vast, measurable extent arose from prolonged, often solitary work, but also from the contributions of a host of interested and knowledgeable people. Minor’s share makes that collective character especially clear, even as his obscurity at his death contrasts with the permanence of the work he helped build.

The dictionary has also been criticized for reflecting an elitist, male, British, and Victorian outlook. That inheritance does not erase its authority or its continuing value as a portrait of the language. The completion announced in 1927 marked a culmination, but the supplements, revised edition, and later digital forms show how the work remained open to correction and addition.