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The ambitious project to create a comprehensive record of the English language was initially conceived by the Philological Society of London in 1857 due to dissatisfaction with existing dictionaries. The goal was to document every word, including obsolete ones, and trace their meanings through time with illustrative quotations. This historical approach was a monumental undertaking, and the original projection of completing the four-volume, 6,400-page work in a decade proved to be wildly optimistic. After years of slow progress, the Oxford University Press took over the project in 1879, with lexicographer James A. H. Murray appointed as the editor.
A key reason for the dictionary's lengthy creation was its unique and thorough methodology. The project relied on a vast network (Review) of volunteer readers from around the English-speaking world who would read literature and send in quotations on small paper slips illustrating a word's usage. Murray and his team established a "Scriptorium" in his garden to house the millions of incoming slips. The sheer volume of this crowdsourced material, which formed the evidence base for the dictionary, was immense. By 1884, after five years of work by the Oxford team, they had only reached the word "Ant," forcing a change in plans to publish the dictionary in incremental fascicles, or installments, rather than waiting for the entire work to be completed.
This meticulous process, though time-consuming, is what established the Oxford English Dictionary as the principal historical dictionary of the language. The first of these installments was published on February 1, 1884, with the final section being issued in 1928, completing the ten-volume set. The project not only documented the English language to an unprecedented degree but also involved a diverse range of contributors, from scholars to the general public, and even received contributions from notable figures like J.R.R. Tolkien, who worked as an assistant lexicographer for a year.