It's massive. 4,448 pages. 2 volumes. 920,000 entries. Over 40 years of work compiling it. Poets & Writers Magazine has a behind-the-scenes look about how it was created.
From the piece...
Begun in 1965 under the auspices of the University of Glasgow, the project has passed through several technological incarnations—moving from paper slips to microfilm to computer files—and survived the death of founders and dodgy financial backing. Christian Kay, one of the work's four coeditors, was twenty-seven when she joined the endeavor as a research assistant. She's now a sixty-nine-year-old professor. "Fund-raising produced all sorts of cliff-hangers," Kay told the Times of London. "People didn't know if they would get paid or not. Just as the money was about to run out, you would get a little bit more from one academic foundation or another."
Work in the early years progressed slowly, with researchers combing the twenty volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary and transcribing lists of synonyms on 6 x 4-inch cards. In 1978, things nearly went up in smoke when the building housing the sole copy of the work-in-progress caught fire. The nineteenth-century structure was burned to a shell, but the thesaurus—safely ensconced in metal cabinets—survived the blaze. "We were always very good about putting things away at night," Kay told the Daily Mail, "and the Victorian doors stood up well, although you can still see singe marks on some of the documents."
The project's chief intellectual hurdle was devising a classification system capable of organizing the more than 920,000 lexical items collected over the decades.
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