A number of people have asked us why we have gone to all this trouble to put a hundred-year-old dictionary on the World Wide Web. The answer can be summed up in three words: it's free, it's big, and it's beautiful. Not long after I finished working for the Oxford English Dictionary and started working with the DjVu development group at AT&T Labs, I realized that the DjVu format offered exciting, new possibilities for publishing dictionaries and other large-scale reference works online. A handful of experimental samples that I created for the DjVu Zone website confirmed this, and my wife and I began to consider how, with limited personal resources and working in our spare time, something on this scale might actually be done. Obviously, we needed a text in the public domain, and several candidates immediately suggested themselves.
    We could have chosen (and indeed might still do someday) an early dictionary of chiefly historical interest, such as Dr. Johnson's, the early Webster's, or Joseph Worcester's dictionaries. All these texts are relatively small, which might have made the digitization process easier, but such works are of interest and use chiefly to scholars and would arouse only limited curiosity among the general public.

The Century Dictionary

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