Finishing today a quite interesting book on the making of the Oxford English Dictionary. How many of you would have guessed that it was heavily contributed to by a madman in an insane asylum in England? Truly so. If you like reading and words, this will engross you. It's amazing what goes into just putting 1 word into the dictionary. It is more amazing that a madman contibuted countless words and quotations to it for 20 continuous years. If you get the chance , check out The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester.

If you're interested in the dictionary, you can view it online by going to the OED web site. They have a nice free tour of how the online dictionary works. (You have to suscribe to use the actuall full online version though). If you want it on CD ROM, you can get it that way, too. Requires 1.1 Gigs of Hard Drive space to run it off the CD, if you install it completely to your hard drive, it will take 1.7 Gigs of space. And it's a mere $295.00! If you just want to access it online, you will be happy to hear that a 12 month (minimum length of time) subscription is also a mere $295.00! If you want the 20 volume printed version, it's a mere $895 + $60 shipping. (and that's a special price to celebrate the dictionary's 75th anniversary this year - price good till 12/31/2003, so better snap one up now!). (The dictionary project was actually begun in 1857, but wasn't first published until 1928)

You can view a "word of the day" for free. The one today is "knitting" and can be viewed here. It is amazing how people collected all these various instances of how these words were used and then submitted them to Oxford to be sorted,analyzed, filed, collated,etc.,etc. They had people all over the world reading all kinds of books and then submitting these entries. Easy to understand why it took them 70 years to make it a reality.