Edited initially by James Murray, the OED's first installment appeared as a slim, 352-page fascicle covering only a fraction of the alphabet. Begun in 1857 by the Philological Society, the project aimed to trace every English word's history through quotations. It would take another 44 years to complete the full first edition.
The dictionary's method was radical for its time: rather than simply defining words, editors wanted to document the entire life of each word, tracing its earliest recorded use and every meaningful shift in meaning through quoted passages. This required an army of volunteer readers combing through centuries of books, sending in slips of paper with quotations — a crowdsourced research project decades before the term existed.
James Murray, a largely self-taught Scottish schoolmaster, took over as editor in 1879 and built a corrugated iron shed in his garden in Oxford, nicknamed the 'Scriptorium,' to house the growing mountain of quotation slips — eventually numbering in the millions.
One of the dictionary's most prolific and unusual contributors was Dr. William Chester Minor, an American army surgeon confined to an asylum for the criminally insane after committing murder during a psychotic episode; his story later became the subject of the book 'The Professor and the Madman.' The complete first edition wasn't finished until 1928, a testament to the project's staggering ambition.
Key people: James Murray, William Chester Minor