In 1879, the Oxford University Press appointed Professor James Murray as editor of the challenging "big dictionary project", aimed to supplant Samuel Johnson's groundbreaking, but in many respects incomplete, A Dictionary of the English Language (1755). Murray's first step was to publish "An Appeal to the English-speaking and English-reading Public in Great Britain, America and the Colonies", to find volunteers to trawl through the world's English-language literature – not only for words, but also for illustrative quotations to trace their history and use.
Murray viewed English as a nucleus of words whose 'Anglicity' was unquestioned. This nucleus, he believed, was surrounded by a periphery of dialectical, slang, technical, scientific and foreign terms – the last now mostly grouped into varieties of English such as Aboriginal or Nigerian. Foreign terms included many from the Subcontinent as well, collectively referred to as Anglo-Indian, although a surprising number actually originated in Ceylon (Buddha, puja, rattan among them). Even the Maldives contributed atoll. Today, this general division is acknowledged, with Indian English and Sri Lankan English recognised as varieties of British Standard English.
Murray was fortunate, for Colonel Henry Yule (and A C Burnell, before his death in 1882) were compiling the first major Anglo-Indian dictionary, Hobson-Jobson: A glossary of colloquial Anglo-Indian words and phrases, and of kindred terms, etymological, historical, geographical and discursive (1886). There occurred not merely a general compilation overlap but a specific overlap of entries, so consultation between Yule and Murray led to refined definitions and shared use of quintessential illustrative quotations. The dictionary's Anglo-Indian aspect was further enhanced by the input of two enigmatic American volunteers, the better-known being the certified insane convicted murderer William Minor, who spent his youth in Jaffna. As documented in Simon Winchester's The Professor and the Madman: A tale of murder, insanity, and the making of the Oxford English Dictionary (1998), Minor researched for decades in a book-stacked cell at Broadmoor Asylum, England. Lesser-known is Fitzedward Hall, who had resided in India, gained fluency in Hindustani, Bengali, Sanskrit and Persian, then moved to England and, after a fearsome academic dispute, became such a recluse that even his family fled.
Murray and his successors' monumental effort, the 10-volume New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, was published in complete form only in 1928. Five years later, it was reprinted in 17 volumes as the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), and in 1989 a second edition (OED2), an amalgam of a supplement and the first edition, appeared in 20 volumes. This monumental work contained 291,500 entries, defining 615,100 words illustrated by 2,436,600 quotations. With the advent of OED Online at the turn of the century, work began on a revised and expanded third edition (OED3), which may ultimately define a million words but is expected to take some 36 years to complete.