The Oxford English Dictionary Publishes Its First Part

On 1 February 1884, Oxford University Press published the first unbound instalment of a monumental lexicographical undertaking: A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles. Priced at twelve shillings and sixpence, the 352-page fascicle covered the vocabulary running from A to Ant. It represented twenty-seven years of preparatory labour by Britain's Philological Society, yet public reception was restrained, with sales reaching only about 4,000 copies. Rather than an exhaustive cataloguing of the entire language, this modest debut was merely the first printed segment of what would eventually become the Oxford English Dictionary.

The initiative originated in June 1857, when members of the Philological Society in London established an Unregistered Words Committee to address perceived deficiencies in existing reference works. In November of that year, Richard Chenevix Trench presented a paper pointing out seven major failures across contemporary dictionaries, including the neglect of obsolete terms, inconsistent treatment of word families, and a lack of illustrative historical quotations. In January 1858, the society resolved to compile a comprehensive historical dictionary from scratch. Rather than relying on a small committee, they enlisted volunteer readers to comb through literature and record real instances of word usage onto paper slips.