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Computers, which were created in the 1940s to produce wartime ballistic firing tables, originally manipulated numbers. But since computational methods had helped to break enemy codes, Cold War resources were poured into computerizing dictionaries in…

Though little new research was involved in merging the OED with its Supplement, it’s hard to conceive the scale of the task of producing this second edition. Typing the dictionary’s third of a billion characters took 120 person-years, and…

For all its virtues, the newly supplemented OED could be a nuisance to use: words might appear in either or both of two separate alphabetical sequences. Burchfield was asked when the two would be merged. “Never,” he told Bryan Garner in July 1979.…

The moment the OED was completed in 1928, it was dated. A stopgap supplement was completed five years later, but the language kept evolving. When in 1957 Robert W. Burchfield was charged with bringing the big dictionary up to date, it was thought…

Born in New Zealand in 1923, Burchfield came to Magdalen College, Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar. He became editor of the Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary in 1957. He later wrote several popular books, including The English Language (1985)…

In October 1969, the editors of American Heritage sent E.B. White a copy, hoping for an endorsement. He politely declined, but his letter ended cryptically: “I must return to the kitchen now and continue with my preparation of vichyssoise. Yrs, EB…

James Parton, founder of American Heritage magazine, was eager to get into the dictionary business, and the brouhaha over Webster’s Third gave him an opening. He hired a team to produce an alternative to Merriam. Where Gove had been permissive,…