Quite the excellent book, pip pip

The Meaning of Everything | Simon Winchester

THE MEANING OF EVERYTHING is a scintillating account of the creation of the greatest monument erected to a living language.

We all knew, didn't we, writing a dictionary is a monumental undertaking, especially a dictionary of a messy, expressive, continually changing language like English, but we didn't know (believe me, we had no idea) just how monumental until we read Simon Winchester's "The Meaning of Everything," the story of the Oxford English Dictionary. The OED is a book (or more accurately, set of books) on which work began in about 1860 and which has been published in its full, bound, printed glory only twice, in 1928 and 1989. This book is the story of how it was done (and how it's still being done—a new edition is expected "sometime in the early 21st Century," which is more or less pretty soon).

Also, it's a book full of cool, stuffy English stuff, so it's worth reading just for that, right there.