Creator
Rob Judges
Title
Photo of Andrew Rosenheim of Oxford University Press holding an OED CD-ROM in front of a cart loaded with OED2 volumes.
Description
The OED was digitized to produce the printed OED2, but the invention of the CD-ROM in the mid-1980s made it possible to distribute the entire dictionary to users who could never have afforded (or found room for) 20 heavy volumes. More important, when users could search the entire text, not merely the headwords, it became possible to ask new questions: show me every quotation from Paradise Lost, or all the words that entered English from Arabic in the 14th century. Nothing like that was even thinkable before.
Source
Ex coll. Karolyne & Bryan A. Garner. HHD no. 128