4 ideas
Rather than prescribing correct usage, a dictionary can define a word by tracing how its meanings actually evolved over time, documenting each sense with dated quotations showing the word in real use. This turns lexicography into empirical history: meaning is discovered from the evidence of writing across centuries, not decreed by an authority.
A task too vast for any staff can be completed by recruiting thousands of unpaid volunteer readers, each combing assigned books and mailing in quotation slips for words they encounter. The central editors then aggregate and sort these contributions, converting scattered amateur effort into a systematic reference work.
William Chester Minor, one of the Dictionary's most prolific and valuable quotation contributors, was a criminally insane American surgeon confined to Broadmoor asylum for murder, doing his research from his cell. His institutional confinement gave him the uninterrupted time and library to outproduce almost every other volunteer.
The Dictionary was projected to take a few years but consumed roughly seventy, outliving its original editors and requiring institutional patience across generations to complete. Ambitious reference and infrastructure projects routinely exceed their founders' lifespans, so their success depends on continuity of purpose rather than adherence to schedule.