The invention of the internet has sped up the process of production of the dictionary by allowing research to be done quicker, but it hasn’t reduced the time it takes to create a dictionary all that much. On the internet new words are created everyday and are going out of fashion as quick as people can pick up on them. This means that dictionary authors have more of a challenge when deciding to include words.

The third edition of the Oxford English dictionary (OED) was started in 1994 and isn’t set to be completed until at least 2034. As of 2014 the authors of the OED were only able to define 50 to 60 words a month as a team of 70 philologists; less than a word per person a month. This is due to the fact that there is so much information to go through online and so many more words to include. The size of this edition will fill 40 volumes and will be at least double the length of the second volume which only came out in 1989, and this was as of 2014. Only 20 years into the edition’s 40 year creation and already predicted as double. That doesn’t even include the next two decades of words!

In addition to creating the new edition, the OED also has an online version of their work. This virtual dictionary is updated four times a year with 2000 entries changed each time due to the speed at which words are created/destroyed on the internet. That fact clearly shows how fast the English language is changing. Aside from the natural change of the language, the entires are also updated to account for new discoveries on the “author’ of a word. For example, the second edition of the OED had 39 entries accredited to Earnest Hemingway while the online version had 46 as of 2007. The online OED probably even has a different number today!