The OED covers words from across the English-speaking world, from North America to South Africa, from Australia and New Zealand to the Caribbean. It also offers the best in etymological analysis and in listing of variant spellings, and it shows pronunciation using the International Phonetic Alphabet.

As the OED is a historical dictionary, its entry structure is very different from that of a dictionary of current English, in which only present-day senses are covered, and in which the most common meanings or senses are described first. For each word in the OED, the various groupings of senses are dealt with in chronological order according to the quotation evidence, i.e. the senses with the earliest quotations appear first, and the senses which have developed more recently appear further down the entry. In a complex entry with many strands, the development over time can be seen in a structure with several ‘branches’.

Features and benefits:
* The Oxford English Dictionary is the internationally recognized authority on the English Language, defining more than 500,000 words and tracing their usage through 2.5 million quotations from a wide range of literary and other sources. The text on the CD-ROM comprises the full text of the OED 2nd Edition, plus the three Additions volumes, as well as 7,000 new entries from the OED ‘s continuing research
* OED v4.0 on CD-ROM boasts superb search-and-retrieval software, designed specifically for the electronic version, enabling you to investigate the Dictionary in ways not possible with the print edition. Questions which might have taken years of patient research can now be answered in seconds.

Existing functionality retained from earlier versions includes:
* Installation to the hard drive, so the CD is not required during use of the Dictionary
* Options to customize the entry display and show or hide pronunciations, spellings, etymology, and quotation text
* Flexible full text search options, with search filters and an option to rank entries and search results alphabetically or by date

New to this version:
* Now available to Mac users
* Flash-base
* Smoother and faster performance providing instantaneous search results
* New word-wheel which supports incremental letter-by-letter browsing
* 7,000 new words and meanings