江苏省各市的中考任务型专项练习

18 徐州 You may think that English dictionaries have been used for many, many centuries. The spelling of English has always been a problem, but it was more of a problem in the days before a dictionary. In those days people spelt words in different ways which you might find interesting. But it made reading English much more difficult. So dictionaries were invented to encourage everybody to spell the same. In fact, an English dictionary like the kind you use today wasn't made until the time of the Qing Dynasty. The largest dictionary in the world is the仇户rd English Dictionary, or OED for short. The idea for this dictionary came from an important meeting in Britain in 1857. Twenty-two years later, Oxford University asked James Murray to be the editor of its new dictionary. Murray had not been to college. At the age of fourteen, he left his village school in Scotland and taught himself while working in a bank. Later he became a great teacher. After Oxford gave him the job, Murray had a pla