The Oxford English Dictionary

In 1857, members of the Philological Society of London decided that the existing English dictionaries were not good enough. They planned a new dictionary that would record every word in the English language and show how the meaning of each word had changed over time, using real quotations from books.

The task was enormous, so the editors asked the public for help. Volunteers around the world read books and copied quotations onto small slips of paper, which they mailed to the editors. Under James Murray, who became the chief editor in 1879, millions of slips arrived. Murray even built a special iron building in his garden, called the Scriptorium, to store and sort them. One of the most productive volunteers, an American named William Chester Minor, sent thousands of quotations from a hospital where he was a patient.

The project took far longer than planned. The editors had expected to finish in about ten years, but the complete dictionary was not published until 1928, more than seventy years after the idea was first proposed. Its first edition contained over 400,000 words and phrases in ten large volumes.