With an original estimated schedule of twenty years, “the dictionary to end all dictionaries” was completed in sixty-eight. Simon Winchester’s new book The Meaning of Everything sets the scene for the void identified by the creators of the Oxford English Dictionary with a history of the English language and its unwieldy growth patterns, triggered by foreign invasions. The OED’s ambitious goals to catalog not only meanings of words, but also their histories, quotations, and synonyms brought a complexity to a project which ultimately outlived many of its creators. Project managers from all disciplines will relate to the pressures of budget, estimated schedule, and resources that plagued OED editor James Murray. The vast effort needed to properly catalog the English language proved the worth of the task itself.