"The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is a comprehensive multi-volume dictionary published by the Oxford University Press. The OED is generally regarded as the definitive dictionary of Modern English, especially British English. It has 2.5 million quotations under 300,000 headwords.

Although a British institution, the OED has a policy of attempting to record all the known uses and variants of a word in the varieties of world English, even obscure and outdated one, hence also lists American variants of spelling or meanings e.g.,recognize/recognise."