In 1933, a single-volume Supplement to the Dictionary was published. Nevertheless, as soon as the original ten volumes of the New English Dictionary were completed, Craigie and Onions, the two editors still involved with the project, began updating it. After fifty years of work on the first edition, the editors must have found this fact exhausting to contemplate. This means that no dictionary is ever really finished. Murray and his team did manage to publish the first part (or ‘fascicle’, to use the technical term) in 1884, but it was clear by this point that a much more comprehensive work was required than had been imagined by the Philological Society almost thirty years earlier.Īn exhilarating aspect of a living language is that it continually changes. The English language never stops evolving Murray and his Dictionary colleagues had to keep track of new words and new meanings of existing words at the same time that they were trying to examine the previous seven centuries of the language’s development. Not only are the complexities of the English language formidable, but it also never stops evolving. It was not surprising that the project was taking longer than anticipated. Five years down the road, when Murray and his colleagues had only reached as far as the word ‘ant’, they realized it was time to reconsider their schedule. It was estimated that the project would be finished in approximately ten years. The new dictionary was planned as a four-volume, 6,400-page work that would include all English language vocabulary from the Early Middle English period (1150 AD) onward, plus some earlier words if they had continued to be used into Middle English.
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