UK: the latest update of the Oxford English Dictionary

H. G. Wells allowed himself to speculate, in his futuristic novel The world set free (1914), on how much the OED would grow as the twentieth century progressed:Within ten years from the establishment of the World Republic the New English Dictionary [the name under which the Oxford English Dictionary was originally published] had swelled to include a vocabulary of 250,000 words, and a man of 1900 would have found considerable difficulty in reading an ordinary newspaper. On the other hand, the men of the new time could still appreciate the older English literature. View the whole article...