passed by any one man,
however long-lived and however diligent, but must be the work of many
collaborators who would undertake systematically to read and to
extract English literature. He called upon the Philological Society,
therefore, as the only body in England then interesting itself in the
language, to undertake the collection of materials to complete the
work already done by Bailey, Johnson, Todd, Webster, Richardson, and
others, and to prepare a supplement to all the dictionaries, which
should register all omitted words and senses, and supply all the
historical information in which these works were lacking, and, above
all, should give quotations illustrating the first and last
appearance, and every notable point in the life-history of every word.

From this impulse arose the movement which, widened and directed by
much practical experience, has culminated in the preparation of the
Oxford English Dictionary, 'A new English Dictionary on Historical
Principles, founded mainly on the materials collected by the
Philological Society.' This dictionary superadds to all the features
that have been successively evolved by the long chain of workers, the
historical information which Dr. Trench desiderated. It seeks not
merely to record every word that has been used in the language for the
last 800 years, with its written form and signification, and the
pronunciation of the current words, but to furnish a biography of each
word, giving as nearly as possible the date of its birth or first
known appearance, and, in the case of an obsolete word or sense, of
its last appearance, the source from which it was actually derived,
the form and sense with which it entered the language or is first
found in it, and the successive changes of form and developments of
sense which it has since undergone. All these particulars are derived
from historical research; they are an induction of facts gathered by
the widest investigation of the written monuments of the language. For
the purposes of this historical illustration more than five millions
of extracts have been made, by two thousand volunteer Readers, from
innumerable books, representing the English literature of all ages,
and from numerous documentary records. From these, and the further
researches for which they provide a starting-point, the history of
each word is deduced and exhibited.

Since the Philological Society's scheme was propounded, several large
dictionaries have been compi