普通高中课程标准实验教科书 英语必修1 Unit 2 Reading Task

　　THE OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY

　　You may think that English dictionaries have been used for many, many centuries. The spelling of English has always been a problem but it was more of a problem in the days before a dictionary. Then people could spell words in different ways which you might find interesting. But it made reading English much more difficult. So dictionaries were invented to encourage everybody to spell the same. In fact, an English dictionary like the kind you use today wasn't made until the time of the late Qing Dynasty. Three men did most of the important early work on dictionaries: Samuel Johnson, Noah Webster, and James Murray. These men spent nearly all of their lives trying to collect words for their dictionaries. For them, it wasn't only a job; it was a wonderful journey of discovery. The largest dictionary in the world is the Oxford English Dictionary, or OED for short. The idea for this dictionary came from an important meeting in Britain in 1857. Twenty-two years later, Oxford University asked James Murray to be the editor of its new dictionary.

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