The OED Online has been updated and changed (it now contains 600,000 words and 3 million quotations, traces over 1,000 years of the English language, and is integrated with the Historical Thesaurus of the OED .
Access to the new interface is now provided on the library website at http://library.apsu.edu/inform/21OED.htm. A link to the previous version will also be provided here until 3-31-2011.
Below is a description of the new resource taken directly from the Chief Editor John Simpson:
We've tried to tilt the site more towards the English language than towards the dictionary as an end in itself. Search results move from simple lists to visualizations/timelines. They can also be filtered according to a number of categories, allowing you to start off with big numbers (e.g. all English words derived from Italian), and reduce them by steps down to small, significant subsets (e.g. all English words derived from Italian from the field of Music which are first recorded in English in the 18th century). That's 167 words, starting with adagio.
Other new features include pages (updated each quarter from the dictionary data) on the OED's most-cited authors and texts, plus links to other online resources—such as the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography—offering more on those who've shaped the language. There's also an ‘Aspects of English’ section, a series of descriptive articles on language, past and present.
Perhaps the most important new feature involves the Historical Thesaurus to the OED, published in book form in 2009. The entire text is now integrated with the OED Online, so that you can follow semantic links throughout the dictionary.
