Discover the story of English
More than 600,000 words, over a thousand years
Welcome to OED Online. If you or your library subscribes, dive straight in to the riches of the English language. If not, click on the images below to learn more about the OED, see What's new, or take a look at Aspects of English, our language feature section.
Get your annual subscription for just £100/$100!
March 2022 update
Our latest update: more than 700 new words, senses, and sub-entries have been added to the Oxford English Dictionary in our latest update, including dinosaur hunter, vaccine passport, and what’s up, doc?.
New words notes: Learn more about the words added to the OED this quarter in our new words notes by OED Senior Editor, Jonathan Dent.
Release notes: OED Executive Editor, Danica salazar, also discusses the latest Irish English words to be added to the OED, from bockety to banatee in this article.
Release notes: OED Executive Editor, Kate Wild, investigates the link between flattery and blancmange in this blog post on updates to the Historical Thesaurus of the OED.
Helpful resources
- Subscribe
- Learn about the OED
- Help with using OED Online
- Video guides for the OED
- For librarians
- For students and teachers
- Abbreviations used in the OED
- Key to the pronunciation
- Key to symbols and other conventions
- OED webinars
- How-to guide: exploring OED quotations
- How-to guide: using the Historical Thesaurus
- How-to guide: searching the OED
- Guidance on labels and date ranges