complete 20 volume oxford english dictionary book shelf

This is too bad, in a way, since the OED is such a treasure-chest for word-lovers and the print editions have always been wonderful for their serendipity (my favorite such unexpected find: 'toad-eater'). (You can still buy the 'compact' OED, now in one volume and with a magnifying loupe, for $400.) Advertisement Especially when compared to the ease of typing a word into Google. As the proud owner of a condensed two-volume edition of the OED, I can attest to the fact that hauling the volumes from my groaning shelves and digging out the magnifying glass (!) needed in order to look up a single word of the microscopic type is a burden. Or perhaps we should say no one buys the complete work apart from some libraries and collectors abridgments still sell, but dictionaries have increasingly moved online. Unfortunately, no one buys their work in its print form. After years of work (the second edition appeared in 1989), they are only 28 percent finished with the third edition. Today, the Oxford University Press, which publishes the work, employs 80 professional lexicographers, none of whom (to the best of our knowledge) have been subjected to a peotomy, 'auto' or otherwise.

This astonishing linguistic achievement, first appearing in full in 1928, was a bookshelf-breaking set of volumes containing almost half a million words and two million quotations illustrating word usage over the centuries-and a decent chunk of those quotations came from a former US Civil War veteran who eventually savaged his own genitals with a pen (performing an 'autopeotomy') while residing in a UK hospital for the criminally insane. Take the monumental and splendiferously fecund pulchritude that is the Oxford English Dictionary as an example. They just don't make dictionaries like they used to-though perhaps that's a good thing in some ways.

Complete 20 volume oxford english dictionary book shelf