The Oxford English Dictionary was conceived as an impossibly ambitious project to trace every word's full history

Winchester explains that the dictionary's founders were not content with defining words as they were currently used — they wanted to document the entire recorded life of every English word, tracing its earliest appearance, every significant shift in meaning, and its usage across centuries, all supported by dated, quoted evidence from real texts.

This meant the project could not simply rely on a small team of scholars; it required an enormous volume of citations pulled from a vast range of historical printed sources, far more than any editorial staff could gather alone. The scale ultimately demanded the crowdsourced participation of volunteer readers across Britain and beyond, decades before that model of distributed labor had a name.

Winchester frames the resulting project's multi-decade timeline, far exceeding original estimates, as a direct consequence of this scope: a genuinely comprehensive historical dictionary of English turned out to be one of the most labor-intensive scholarly undertakings ever attempted.