"OED" redirects here. For other uses, see OED (disambiguation). The Oxford English
Dictionary (OED) is a dictionary published
by the Oxford University Press (OUP). Generally regarded as the most comprehensive and scholarly
dictionary of English, it includes about 301,100 main entries, as of November 30, 2005, comprising over 350 million printed characters. In addition to the headwords of main entries, the OED contains 157,000 combinations and derivatives in bold type, and 169,000 phrases and combinations in bold italic type, making a total of 616,500 word-forms. There are 137,000 pronunciations, 249,300 etymologies, 577,000 cross-references, and 2,412,400 illustrative quotations.The policy of the OED is to attempt to record all known uses and variants of a word in all varieties of English, worldwide, past and present. To quote the 1933 Preface:The aim of this Dictionary is to present in alphabetical series the words that have formed the English
vocabulary from the time of the earliest records down to the present day, with all the relevant facts concerning their form, sense-history, pronunciation, and etymology. It embraces not only the standard language of literature and conversation, whether current at the moment, or obsolete, or archaic, but also the main technical vocabulary, and a large measure of dialectal usage and slang. The OED is the starting point for much scholarly work regarding words in English. Its choice of the order in which to list variant spellings of headwords is influential on written English in many countries.