The mission of World English Historical Dictionary is the publication of the most comprehensive newly edited historical dictionary freely available on the Web, making it an indispensable English-language Internet Humanities tool.
Central to this mission is the full-text of James Murray’s A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles (NED) (1888–1928). Considered one of the greatest accomplishments in the English language, its million-plus quotations in nearly 200,000 main entries (79,000 of which are available as of Jan. 2024)—the result of untold years of work by thousands of volunteers—makes it an essential resource for the student, researcher and intellectually curious reader.
A good place to start is the List of Common Words, which groups those with the most involved stories to tell.
Sincerely,
Steven H. van Leeuwen, Editor (iam@shvlry.com)
About the Editor: Trained as a medical editor at Cornell Med. and Elsevier, van Leeuwen became the first coordinator of public information on the Internet at Columbia University (ColumbiaNet) in 1990, and then as Editor-in-Chief of ColumbiaWeb, one of the first professional webmasters. In 1992 he started a quotation of the day, which quickly evolved into a full-text digital humanities project called Bartleby, which published the first work of classic literature in HTML in 1994. In 1999 he incorporated Bartleby.com and was the first to license a suite of freely available reference works, including the American Heritage Dictionary. In 2016 he sold the company, which became the premiere online brand of Barnes & Noble Education, which operates hundreds of university bookstores. In 2018 he began a dictionary project, which became WEHD.com.
From age 15 to 45 he attended 30 semesters of in-class higher-education courses at Glendale C.C., Cornell (B.A., Government 1988), Columbia and The New School, with a focus on Intellectual History. He lives in the Inwood neighborhood of Manhattan with his partner of 25 years (and thousands of books).
