 Hello, and welcome to Spotlight. I'm Mike Procter and I'm Ruby Jones. This program uses a special English method of broadcasting. It is easier for people to understand, no matter where in the world they live. Mr. Amon Shea is 37 years old. He lives in New York and he has just finished reading a book. What is so special about that, you may ask? I have read many books. But imagine reading a book that weighs 62 kilograms. A book that is so big that it is divided into 20 separate books. And imagine reading all of it. This is what Amon Shea did. Amon Shea loves words. When he was 10 years old he started reading word books, dictionaries. He wanted to discover English words that he did not know. The dictionaries explained the meaning of the words. So he would know when and how to use them. Now Amon owns a thousand dictionaries. And he made a promise to himself. At some time in his life he would read the entire Oxford English Dictionary or OED. Experts consider the OED to be the best English dictionary in the world. So in 2006 Amon finally started to read the OED. All 20,000 pages of it. Amon Shea started to read the Oxford English Dictionary at home. However there were too many things there that prevented him from concentrating well. He needed to go somewhere quiet. Where could he go? He chose his local university library. This was the perfect place. A library is purely for books and studying. And there Amon found a quiet place to read in peace. Some days Amon spent up to 10 hours in the library. He read page after page of words starting at the letter A. Often it was hard for him to keep awake. He drank a huge amount of coffee and over time his health got worse. He developed terrible pains in his head. It became more difficult for him to see. He injured his neck and back. And he started to forget how to use normal vocabulary. The common words that people use. Amon explains, vocabulary. I began to lose my normal vocabulary. For example, I would go to the store and forget the word for milk. I was looking for the cold white liquid. And it became increasingly difficult for Amon Shea to relate to the world around him. It had a horrible effect on how I behaved with people. There were so many words in my head. I almost became unable to speak. I ended up not being able to get words out of my mouth. Or I would search for words to say, like somebody who had speech problems. There were some days when Amon did not think that he would ever be able to finish reading the book. This was especially true when he reached the words beginning with Un. All 400 pages of them. Amon remembers, could not remember why I ever wanted to read any of this. However, Amon managed to keep reading and reading. And during the whole process, he wrote down the words he found most interesting. Here are some of his favorite ones. Happy-fie, to make someone happy. Catch-in-ator, someone who laughs too much or too loudly. Pigerist, someone who thinks that the world is getting worse. Some-nificator, a person who makes other people feel sleepy. After one year of reading, Amon finally finished the OED. And now he has published a book about his experiences. He wanted to explain why it had been necessary for him to read the OED. And he wanted to share his love of words with other people. He says, The OED is so much more than any other dictionary. It includes the whole history of the strong points and weaknesses of English. It includes the big ideas and the strange ideas that make our language what it is today. People consider the Oxford English Dictionary to be extremely important. They consider it the highest authority on the meaning and pronunciation of the English language. The idea for the dictionary started about 150 years ago. The Philological Society of London was a group of people interested in the scientific study of language. They considered the dictionaries of the time to be incomplete and lacking in enough detail. So they started a huge project, a dictionary that would include all the words in the English language from the 12th century to the modern day. The project started in 1879 and the man responsible for gathering all the necessary information for it was James Murray. He was a schoolteacher from Scotland, a very intelligent man and a hard worker. He needed to be because soon the project workers understood just how big their job was. They had planned to spend 10 years on it but it would take much longer than that. One of the reasons for this was the changing nature of language. Murray and the other workers had to watch for new English words that kept appearing. This was as well as noting all the developments during the past 700 years. In 1884 Murray and his team published the first part of the dictionary in Oxford, England and over the next 40 years work on the dictionary continued. Murray's team of workers increased and thanks to their intense and careful efforts they managed to publish more and more parts. Finally in April 1928 the last part of the dictionary was published. The whole 10 parts contained over 400,000 words and expressions. Sadly James Murray died before his life's work was completed. However his hard labour left behind a great tool for speakers and learners of English. Today the OED is constantly updated and you can find it on the internet. We will tell more about the OED today in another spotlight programme. So next time you use a dictionary just think about all the work that was involved in writing it but please do not feel that you have to follow Amon Shea's example and read it from cover to cover. The writer and producer of today's programme was Ruby Jones. The voices you heard were from the United States and the United Kingdom. All quotes were adapted and voiced by Spotlight. You can contact Spotlight at radio at radioenglish.net and you can hear this programme again on our website. Our address is www.radioenglish.net. This programme is called Words, Words, Words.