Simon Winchester on Oxford Dictionary

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September 23, 1999
Euan Kerr - Reporter, Simon Winchester - Profiled Subject
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Shakespeare wrote all of his works without the use of a dictionary. Such a thing simply didn't exist in Elizabethan England. The dictionary as we know it is a relatively new invention, and the grandest of them all, the Oxford English Dictionary was only completed 72 years ago. Author Simon Winchester researched the creation of the OED for his book "The Professor and the Madman". He told Minnesota Public Radio's Euan Kerr when the project started in the 1850's with the audacious aim of listing every single word in the English language.

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