Merced College
Library News
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED)
is widely regarded as the accepted authority on
the English language. It is an unsurpassed guide
to the meaning, history, and pronunciation of
600,000 words— past and present—from across the
English-speaking world.
As a historical dictionary, the OED is very different from those of current English, in which the focus is on present-day meanings. You'll still find these in the OED, but you'll also find the history of individual words, and of the language—traced through 3 million quotations, from classic literature and specialist periodicals to films scripts and cookery books.
