Defining moment as dictionary reveals our living language

Perhaps folk who have an agricultural/historical/legal bent will have bumped into "forbyland", which first appeared in a document signed at Ryton near Malton in 1510. It's thought to mean an extra piece of land.

Picking up a printed dictionary and checking a spelling or precise meaning may have become a chore to some in these days of computer spellchecks, but anyone truly delighted by the breadth and depth of the English language will experience a certain "eadi" (happiness) at the news that those clever boffins of every expertise at the Oxford English Dictionary are finding new ways of harnessing all available technology to feed our thirst for words modern and ancient.

Ten years ago the OED – first launched in ten volumes in 1884, with a second 20-volume edition published in 1989 containing 59m words (more than any other language in the world by many country miles – went online but was still a resource used for information about individual words, although it was regularly updated with research about past and present usage. Now a new relaunch of the online OED brings it together into a so-called "3-D dictionary" with the Historical Thesaurus of the OED, shedding light from many different directions on to more than 1,000 years of the English language.

The only dictionary in the world that aims to trace the first known use in every sense of every word in the language, words in the new online version will be grouped according to meaning, so, for instance, you can look up "marry" and find that in days of yore Prince William might have asked Kate to "join giblets", and she would have agreed to be "buckled" (united in wedlock) and showed she was feeling "seely" or "roseate" (happy). The new OED Online also allows users to trace the thousands of revisions made to entries over time.

Among the other goodies offered is a list of writers, historians, chroniclers, poets and dramatists whose works provide the first evidence of a word, or the meaning of a word, in English. From the Venerable Bede ("amanse" – to excommunicate), to Dylan Thomas ("dogdayed") to Len Deighton ("fever pitch"). Other writers who have helped to mould the language are George Orwell ("doublethink" and "newspeak" among many others), PG Wodehouse ("crispish", "zippiness", "cuppa"), Evelyn Waugh ("poping" – converting to Roman Catholicism).

Timelines show the first appearance of words and meanings over 1,000 years, peaks and troughs in their popularity and when words arrived from other cultures or developed through a subject area such as science, law or the military. Ed Weiner, deputy chief editor of the OED, says the relaunch of the online OED is about bringing together the work of several decades to make a three-dimensional view of language.

"We call it the Third Edition, but really it is an ongoing new edition which has further swathes of revised and updated material added every three months. An online dictionary is exciting for all sorts of reasons including the fact that it is a two-way thing: readers contribute their own research such as having found an even earlier usage of a word than we have. It was always difficult getting some people interested in dictionaries, but now that we have people with all sorts of interests using computers, there are many different ways into using it, including curiosity about a hobby and words associated with it through history."

The treasures of the Online OED reveal that words we may think of as fairly newly coined are not what they seem. "Recession", for example, first appears in 1606 when it was used to describe a temporary suspension of work or activity. In 1614 it is found to mean a desertion of party principle; a secondary meaning, appearing in 1832, was the acting of ceding back (as in a piece of territory); and it was only in 1903 that a newspaper referred to the world in an economic context.

Ann Widdecombe might be excited to know that "dance" has been with us for seven centuries, and for a long time leading someone a dance was to lead them "in a wearying, perplexing course...with no adequate result." That just about fits the bill.