A group of scholars, calling themselves the philological society decided in 1858 that the time had come for a new Dictionary to be compiled. They set themselves the stupendous(巨大的) task, not only of recording every word to be found in English writings from about the year AD 1000, but also of tracing the history of each from its first appearance in manuscript,(手稿) and showing the changes it had undergone in form, spelling and meaning. Like Johnson, they planned to illustrate the use of the word by quotations（引语) from various writers, but unlike him they were to give a whole series of quotations for each word, illustrating its complete recorded history.
To find suitable quotations, they enlisted the aid of hundreds of volunteers, who undertook to read texts and sent in the quotations on slips of paper. Many of the older works which had to be sifted（详审）in this way existed only as rare manuscripts, so that one of the first steps necessary was for arrangements to be made for these to be printed and published. In the course of many years, some six million slips were went in by readers from all over the world.
Progress in compiling the Dictionary was, naturally, slow. Three different editors had a hand in the task before the first installment（部分）was published in 1884-and that installment covered part of the letter A. It was not until 1928, just eighty years after it was started that the final section of the New English Dictionary came out. It filled ten large volumes and dealt with 240,165 main words-the greatest dictionary of any language in the world.
Valuable though the actual volumes of the dictionary were, there was perhaps an even more valuable product of this enterprise- a new way of thinking about language problems and 'rules'. The emphasis, you will have noticed, was upon history. The compilers did not pretend to lay down a certain 'correct' way of using a word, but showed us the various users to which it had actually been put at various times in the past They bring home to us the idea of language as a living, growing thing not as something that can ever be 'fixed'.
This new approach has had important results. The grammarian can now regard it as his business to examine the way in which the language works and to describe what he finds. Such descriptive（描述的）grammar is sometimes at odds（不一致）with that of the prescriptive grammarian who sets out with a set of rules and uses them to argue what ought to be. The prescriptive grammarian will tell us that we ought to say.
