English language

• Deutsches Wörterbuch

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. The OED is a historical dictionary and traces back the historical development of the English language and its many variations, and describes the usage of individual words. Work on the OED began in 1857. The first electronic version of the dictionary was made available in 1989 and an online version in 2000.

Roget’s thesaurus was created by Peter Mark Roget, a British physician and lexicographer, in 1805. The first edition of the now widely used English-language thesaurus was published in 1852 by Longmans, London, covering 15,000 words. The most recent editions (the eighth) contains 443,000 words.