Summa minutiae

A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought. — Lord Peter Wimsey

A guide to the Oxford English Dictionary

The first edition of the venerable Oxford English Dictionary is in the public domain, and the Internet Archive hosts the whole thing—somewhere over 10,000 pages of detailed etymologies, exhaustive definitions, and apposite quotations from throughout the history of English.

But there’s no interface. Some guys worked toward a fancy interface a few years ago, but that project seems to be dead.

My bright idea is to provide a list of hyperlinks to the pages at the Internet Archive. It’s a dead-simple solution with all the portability and longevity of plain text, and it lets Internet Archive handle storage and bandwidth.

Sometime I’ll tell the story of how I used the Wolfram Language to make this project a lot easier.

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