The first edition was printed in 1928, ten volumes worth. The last edition may be coming soon, as the Oxford English Dictionary may go all digital. The New Yorker has more.
From the piece...
Perhaps, but it seems inevitable that the O.E.D., which has had an online presence for over a decade, will eventually abandon its weighty print form. When the first complete edition was published, in 1928, it comprised ten volumes and four hundred thousand definitions, ending with the Scrabble dream word “zyxt.” The second edition weighs in at a hundred and thirty-five pounds—about as much as the average woman—and fills four feet of shelf space. Weight and size are central to the idea of what the O.E.D. is; authority, in dictionaries, seems to come proportionate to mass, and when it comes to dictionaries, the O.E.D.’s authority is supreme. I have a sense that a weightless O.E.D., instead of being the last word in words, would become just more “information” of the sort that’s found everywhere online.
In terms of use, too, an online-only O.E.D. seems to run counter to the very idea of the O.E.D.: the process of consulting this vast compendium of the English language—made quasi-ritualistic by the addition of the sacerdotal pedestal and magnifying lens—would be reduced to nothing more than a breezy click of the mouse.
Not that breeziness itself is unappealing. Admittedly, I rarely find myself turning to a printed dictionary of any heft, let alone to the O.E.D., when speed or ease is of any concern at all (the correct spelling of “sacerdotal” above comes courtesy of the Merriam-Webster online).
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