Today in 1884, the first part (or fascicle) of the Oxford English Dictionary, was published.
A 352-page volume, it defined words from “A to Ant,” corroborated by quotations from historical sources. The full title of the dictionary when it was first released was A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles; Founded Mainly on the Materials Collected by The Philological Society.
The 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1910-1911) noted that “the chief difficulty in the way of this use of quotations – after the difficulty of collection – is that of finding space for them in a dictionary of reasonable size.”
Today’s online edition of the OED contains 3.5 million quotations.