People aren’t giving the article a full shake - you need to read past the first three paragraphs. The agonizing over woke terms is trying to show the rigor of t

People aren’t giving the article a full shake - you need to read past the first three paragraphs. The agonizing over woke terms is trying to show the rigor of the lexicographers & that they are trying their best to keep the work current with modern English speakers. The rest was really interesting - I wasn’t aware of the history of the OED, and this article gives a decent intro & dive into the process. Some selections I found interesting— > By the time the complete first edition was published in 1928, at a length of 16,000 pages, more than 70 years had passed… It was already out of date > “Our histories, our novels, our poems, our plays – they are all in this one book,” said Stanley Baldwin, the then prime minister, at a dinner to mark the completion of the first edition. > Having an open mind is essential for the role. “When you’re a lexicographer, if you hear a word that you’ve never heard before, you don’t go, ‘Ew, yuck, what’s that?’ You go, ‘Hmm, that’s interesting, why did they say it like that?’ You want to learn more. > The OED has never turned a profit: by 1911 the university press had spent £150,000 on it and made less than £60,000 in sales. Today’s revision programme is backed by £34m in funding