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4-volume work in a period of 10 years; but after 5 years, Murray
and his colleagues had managed to complete only the section A-
ANT; it was 352 pages, and sold for 62 ½ p in modern money. It
was evident that the dictionary was a much greater work than had
been envisaged. Additional editors were appointed and the last
volume was published in 1928, the dictionary was called NED
(New English Dictionary). It contained 12 volumes, comprising
15,487 pages and covering 414,825 lexical items.
In 1933 the dictionary was republished under the title «The
Oxford English Dictionary» because the work on this dictionary
was conducted at Oxford. The dictionary contained 13 volumes.
Work on the dictionary recommended in1957, with the
appointment of R.W. Burchfield to edit a new supplement. This
appeared in 4 volumes between 1972 and 1986, and included the
content of the 1933 work: it added 5,732 pages to the dictionary,
and nearly 70,000 further lexical items.
As it was large and very expensive scientists continued their
work and made shorter editions of the dictionary. The shorter
Oxford dictionary contained the same number of entries but far
less examples from literature. They also compiled a Concise
Oxford Dictionary. It contained only one volume and no examples
at all.
American lexicography began to develop much later at the
th
end of the 18 century. The most famous American dictionary was
compiled by Noah Webster. In 1828 he published a two volume
dictionary (70,000 words), which was called American Dictionary
of the English language. He tried to simplify English spelling and
transcription. The work greatly improved the coverage of scientific
and technical terms, as well as terms to do with American culture
and institutions and added a great deal of encyclopedic
information. A new feature was the introduction of Webster’s own
etymologies – though the speculative nature of many of these was
an early source of unwelcome criticism. The spellings were
somewhat more conservative than those used in the 1806 book. Its

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