Why Big Phil Scolari's image is a little outdated

Peter Mark Roget published the first thesaurus in 1852: in English, of course. Well, what other language would have had use for it? English has breadth and complexity unsurpassed, offering hundreds upon thousands of synonyms and affording its speakers an abundance of linguistic opportunity. The Oxford English Dictionary, last published in 1989, took 20 volumes to do its subject justice, with two additional volumes published at a later date. The initial publication ran to 21,730 pages, totalled 59 million words and 60,000 alone were used to define the 430 senses of the word “set”. Not that the OED redundantly documents the obscure to achieve its impressive size and status; if it encapsulated every technical or scientific term in the English language, its pagination would more than double. As it is, there are 200,000 words in... [read full story]