The Omnificent English Dictionary In Limerick Form (The OEDILF) is an open collaborative project to compile an English dictionary whose entries all take the form of limericks. The project was originally called the "Oxford English Dictionary in Limerick Form", but the OED’s legal department advised against it. The site, launched in May 2004, has attracted over 1,800 writers from around the world, many of whom are active at any particular time. Together these writers have submitted more than 80,000 limericks on over 66,000 different words, phrases, and names (as of November 2012) — believed to be the largest corpus of original limericks ever produced. The project progresses alphabetically, and is currently accepting only those words beginning with the letters Aa- through Ez-. The entire project is expected to take decades before being considered complete. An estimated completion date was added in 2011, which currently claims that 5th March, 2039, will be the day they finally finish. Other OEDILFers believe that, due to the nature of our malleable language, they will merely be done with a "first edition" at that time and will move on to work on filling in all the meanings (many words have more than one) they may have omitted and all of the new words coined during the writing of this first edition.
The OEDILF has been featured on National Public Radio in the U.S., on BBC Radio 4 in the UK, CBC radio in Canada, and in the pages of the Washington Post, the Glasgow Herald, and various other newspapers. It was also named one of PC Magazine's Top 99 Undiscovered Websites of 2006.
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“He utters substantial English thoughts in plainest English dialects.... Indeed, for fluency and skill in the use of the English tongue, he is a master unrivaled. His felicity and power of expression surpass even his special merits as historian and critic.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The much vaunted male logic isn’t logical, because they display prejudices—against half the human race—that are considered prejudices according to any dictionary definition.”
—Eva Figes (b. 1932)
“Galway is a blackguard place,
To Cork I give my curse,
Tralee is bad enough,
But Limerick is worse.
Which is worst I cannot tell,
They’re everyone so filthy,
But of the towns which I have seen
Worst luck to Clonakilty.”
—Anonymous. “Clonakilty,” from Geoffrey Grigson’s Faber Book of Epigrams and Epitaphs, Faber & Faber (1977)
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)