No more paper OED

The days of the150-lb, 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary are numbered. This week, Oxford University Press announced it’s just too expensive to print.

The next complete edition of the dictionary, dubbed OED3, will only be available online. The dictionary was first published in 1928, after 71 years of exhaustive research on all the conceivable words in the English language, including Scrabble-lovers “zyxt.” An online edition of the OED has been around since the 1980s.