The mahurat of OED Online: launching the web site

'For anyone who loves to fossick though the pages of a great dictionary, the OED Online is a remarkable experience... In the history of the English language, then, 14 March 2000 deserves to be compared to 15 April 1755, the publication day of Dr Johnson's Dictionary.'
Robert McCrum, The Observer

'An auspicious moment for beginning an enterprise.' OED Online entry for mahurat, published 14 March, 2000.

On Tuesday 14 March 2000, the Oxford English Dictionary joined the dotcom revolution with the launch of its online edition, featuring the entire contents of the Second Edition, the three-volume Additions Series, and the first fruits of the revision programme (the range M to mahurat). Like most commercial web sites, it does not make a profit, but unlike others, its designers are not millionaires.

For the publication group, 14 March 2000 was in fact a day of relative peace and quiet: the months of furious activity getting the site ready for launch were finally over, and the new routines of regular publication on the site had yet to kick in. The web site's programmers and hosts, HighWire Press, after months of working incredibly long hours and drinking heroic amounts of coffee, were on standby in case of any launch-day glitches. Given the amount of testing that took place, the site was expected to work smoothly; the one unknown factor was the level of Internet traffic on the day, which had the potential to cause the site to slow down or even crash.

The online Dictionary had been tested and retested, not only at OUP, but also at several institutions which kindly volunteered their services as beta testers, and at a specialist Belgian testing house, PMTC. The beta testers found few problems, and made many useful suggestions. Some of these were noted as potential future enhancements, others were relatively easy to implement straightaway, such as the addition of a list of commonly abbreviated author names to the Help text, enabling users to identify Shakes. as Shakespeare, for example. Other final touches to the site included inserting the remaining special characters into the text (the OED text includes well over a thousand symbols, accented letters, etc., not found on a regular keyboard).

While the site was being prepared, the publicity campaign was gaining momentum. Several editors cleared their diaries for the expected barrage of interview requests. Media interest was whipped up by a detailed press pack, prepared by Juliet New, which arrived on journalists' desks on Friday 10 March. This pack included a feature on new and revised entries in OED Online, a set of OED facts and figures, a list of creative ways to use OED Online, and a feature on World English in the OED.

On Monday 13 March, in the library of London University, Thomas Murray, the five-year-old great-great-great-grandson of Sir James Murray, became the first person to use OED Online, accompanied by John Simpson, Yvonne Warburton (Editorial Publication Manager), and a number of reporters and photographers. Young Thomas, as was hoped, proved rather more photogenic than a pile of OED volumes and a computer screen, and his picture appeared in several newspapers the following day.

On Tuesday 14 March 2000, at one minute past midnight, OED Online was officially launched, and the first subscribers started to use the Dictionary. Over the next few days, interviews were given to radio and television stations in the UK, US, Canada, and South Africa, and features began to appear in newspapers and magazines all over the world, from New York to Hong Kong, and from Sydney to Zurich. In terms of publicity and of technology, the launch was a success. All that remained was to wait for the reviews:

'Quick to access and easy to use... A browser's paradise.'
Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, The Times

'The OED will instantly become the internet's biggest, most prestige-laden reference book... The site is elegant, image-free and lucidly signposted with a range of handsome fonts.'
John Ezard, The Guardian