“We can hear everything that’s going on in the world of English for the last 500 years, and it’s deafening,” said the associate editor Peter Gilliver, who once spent nine months revising definitions for the word “run,” currently the longest single entry in the O.E.D.

Image Michael Proffitt on the grounds of Oxford University Press. Credit... Andrew Testa for The New York Times

Literary texts accounted for most quotations in the early days of the dictionary. But the current text is far more inclusive, with blog and Twitter postings, quotations from gravestones, an inscription in a high school yearbook. The objective is to find the earliest and most illustrative uses of a word, not to grant benediction to anything as “proper English.” Each time commentators rebuke the O.E.D. for admitting teenage slang or marketing jargon, they misunderstand the dictionary, which aims not to define how language should be used, only how it is.

This prompts a question: If the dictionary merely describes what exists, then why not include every word? When the O.E.D. needed to fit into printed volumes, that notion was fantasy. Now, when there is doubt that the third edition will even appear in print, why not use digital space to accommodate everything?

The linguist and writer David Crystal appealed to his peers in a 2012 speech, later published, at the University of Glasgow to create a “superdictionary — the ultimate, unprecedented and, of course, unpublishable (on paper) collection of all the lexical items in a language.” This would mean combining major existing dictionaries and adding specialized lexicons, as well as words from global English dialects and new online vocabulary, too.

Mr. Proffitt was reluctant to place the O.E.D. at the forefront of such a project. The dictionary, he said, lacks resources to transform itself this way. Instead, he advocates a federation of reference works. “The superdictionary may be, in fact, superdictionaries,” he said. “What you want is some kind of search that then sends you to the right place.”

Simon Winchester, author of two books on the O.E.D., including the 1998 best seller “The Professor and the Madman,” expressed mixed feelings about the rapidly digitizing dictionary. He hoped, for example, that the third edition would someday come out in print, yet admitted to consulting only the online version now.

“To me, I don’t want the joy of the O.E.D. and the authority that it has to be somehow overwhelmed by the searching abilities, the search engines and so forth,” he said.