They just don’t make dictionaries like they used to—though perhaps that’s a good thing in some ways. Take the monumental and splendiferously fecund pulchritude that is the Oxford English Dictionary as an example. This astonishing linguistic achievement, first appearing in full in 1928, was a bookshelf-breaking set of volumes containing almost half a million words and two million quotations illustrating word usage over the centuries—and a decent chunk of those quotations came from a former US Civil War veteran who eventually savaged his own genitals with a pen (performing an “autopeotomy”) while residing in a UK hospital for the criminally insane.

Today, the Oxford University Press, which publishes the work, employs 80 professional lexicographers, none of whom (to the best of our knowledge) have been subjected to a peotomy, “auto” or otherwise. After years of work (the second edition appeared in 1989), they are only 28 percent finished with the third edition.

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Oxford English Dictionary ponders the (partial) end of print