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“The Oxford English Dictionary has been the last word on words for over a century.”1 https://public.oed.com/history/ [01.12.2020]
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is widely regarded as the accepted authority on the English language, i.e. on the meaning, history, and pronunciation of more than 600,000 words.2cf. OED Homepage/About: https://public.oed.com/about/ [01.12.2020] The OED is a historical dictionary and traces back the historical development of the English language and its many variations, 3https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_English_Dictionary [01.12.2020] The first electronic version of the dictionary was made available in 1989. An online version has been available since 2000.4https://public.oed.com/about/ [01.12.2020]
History
Work on the dictionary began in 1857 as a project of the Philological Society of London, among them Richard Chenevix Trench and Herbert Coleridge, who decided that existing English language dictionaries were incomplete and deficient, and thus planned a comprehensive new dictionary of the English language.5The following paragraphs draws mainly on https://public.oed.com/history/ [01.12.2020] They underestimated the full extent of the work and the resources required, and the project proceeded slowly with changing editors. In 1879, the Society made an agreement with the Oxford University Press to begin work on a New English Dictionary.6ibid., Section How it began James A. Murray became the first editor.
The OED provides large groups of quite short quotations from a wide selection of authors and publications for each word, in contrast to the forerunners of OED, such as the early volumes of the Deutsches Wörterbuch compiled by Jacob Grimm 
and Wilhelm Grimm (Leipzig), that provided few quotations from a limited number of sources.7https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_English_Dictionary [01.12.2020]
The OED was initially planned as a four-volume, 6400-page work to be published in 10 years´ time.8https://public.oed.com/history/, Section “More work than they thought” However, after five years Murray and his team had only covered words from “a” to “ant”. Additionally, they had to keep track of new words and new meanings, further complicating the task. In 1884 they managed to publish the first part (or ‘fascicle’). Over the next four decades, an increasing team of editors (supported by the public who submitted slips on specific words9Winchester (1999)) worked on the completion of the dictionary. After fifty years of work, the full dictionary in ten volumes, now named A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, was published in 1928, containing over 400,000 words and phrases.10https://public.oed.com/history/, Section “One step at a time”
Supplements and new editions
As soon as the New English Dictionary was completed, W.A. Craigie and C.T. Onions, the two editors in charge, began updating it to account for the continuous change of the English language, resulting in a single-volume Supplement to the Dictionary, published in 1933. “Also at this time the original Dictionary was reprinted in twelve volumes and the work was formally given its current title, the Oxford English Dictionary.”11ibid., Section Keeping it current Work on a new supplement began in 1957, with Robert Burchfield appointed the new editor, and was published in four volumes between 1972 and 1986. Burchfield emphasized the inclusion of modern-day English, new words from science and technology, as well as popular culture and colloquial speech, and the developments of the language in English-speaking regions beyond the United Kingdom. In 1984 Oxford University Press began work on the New Oxford English Dictionary Project (NOED) under the administrative direction of Timothy J. Benbow, with John A. Simpson and Edmund S. C. Weiner as co-editors.12ibid., Section “Into the electronic age” The goal was twofold: combining the original text, Burchfield’s supplement, and a small amount of newer material into a single unified dictionary, and providing a full, electronic text to form the basis of future revision and extension of the dictionary. The second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary was printed in 20 volumes and published in 1989. Additionally, a CD-ROM edition was published in 1992, followed by an online publication in 2000. Not only has the format changed over the years, but also the content, which is under constant revision to ensure that the OED “not only provides an important record of the evolution of our language, but also documents the continuing development of our society.”13ibid., Section “The future has begun”