A recent article about people using online scanned books to trace the historical usage of words made me remember an incident from my undergrad days. (Don't ask me what the article was; I cannot remember any citation details, nor can I locate it online.  If I did not remember clearly and distinctly reading the article, I would think I imagined the whole thing).  An English professor once said in class something to the effect that the OED (Oxford English Dictionary)  was the single greatest product of collaboration and dedicated scholarship ever completed by humankind. He made sure to inform us that he said this without apology, and continued by  affirming that, logistically speaking, putting a man on the moon was a piece of cake in comparison. It certainly was an immense example of collaborative work for that era: an army of Victorian Age volunteers combed through all extant works of English Literature to trace the origin and usage of words.  The job was done by hundreds of professionals and dedicated amateurs who conscientiously scoured collections of texts in an effort to identify the first appearance of a word and map it's evolution over time.  The world has changed.  That sort of collaborative effort is now fairly commonplace with web 2.0 tools like wikis.  Moreover, the complete scanning of thousands of texts by Google, Amazon and various academic institutions has the potential to seriously impact the content of the OED. However, in terms of overall accuracy and thoroughness combined with single point accessibility, the OED is still an irreplaceable, one of a kind resource. The OED was once commonly found as large multivolume sets in scholarly libraries.  Now, however, it is frequently accessed as an online database that makes searching much easier. Instead of finding the correct volume and looking up a word alphabetically, you simply type it into the search form, sometimes just the first few letters is sufficient. Also, the online database is constantly updated, so you will find relatively new words of the sort that have become commonplace in a world where digital technology and communication has brought forth a whole new vocabulary.  I remember first using it to look up a word I came across in a Middle English text:  brokke.   It is good for that sort of thing, but you can also try it for a relatively new word like wiki. The OED  is one of the databases available to the Poly community, so why not take it for a spin?  Type in any word that piques your curiosity and see when it first appeared in print and how it has evolved over time.