The News Minute| September 1, 2014| 04.20 pm IST

The Oxford University has completed a dictionary a whole century after it first started working on a 17-volume medieval Latin dictionary by meticulously using thousands of handwritten slips for each entry since 1913.

The last word to be entered in the dictionary was “zythum”, a form of fermented malt drink, said the IBNLive report. Each dictionary entry was assembled using handwritten slips since work on the dictionary began long before the computer era. The final edition which runs up to almost 40,000 pages has used 750,000 slips, with over 100,000 varied senses of words and over 400,000 quotations.

The project had begun as a plan to bring out a medieval Latin equivalent of the Ocford English Dictionary, said the report. The editor Richard Ashdowne said that till 2008, the dictionary had only reached the letter S. 

After the usage of computers, the process speeded up by helping researchers source materials faster than before. There are plans to digitize the dictionary, said the report.