Mildly Infuriating

Welcome to the modern day. Everything is stupid, and intentionally designed for you to have a bad time.

To be fair, if you go back to the pre-Internet era, the OED was pretty expensive in print. Your library might have had a copy, but most people wouldn't.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_English_Dictionary

In 1933, the title The Oxford English Dictionary fully replaced the former name in all occurrences in its reprinting as 12 volumes with a one-volume supplement. More supplements came over the years until 1989, when the second edition was published, comprising 21,728 pages in 20 volumes.[1] Since 2000, compilation of a third edition of the dictionary has been underway, approximately half of which was complete by 2018.[1]

Most people don't have a 20 volume dictionary floating around the house.

When I was growing up, our house used the Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary.

Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary is a large American dictionary, first published in 1966 as The Random House Dictionary of the English Language: The Unabridged Edition. Edited by Editor-in-chief Jess Stein, it contained 315,000 entries in 2256 pages, as well as 2400 illustrations.

That's pretty beefy for a single book, but it's a far smaller and less-costly dictionary than the OED.

Various libraries near me might have had an OED, but I don't think I ever used it there, either.

My guess is that if you were gonna have a big set of reference books, you'd probably be more likely to have an encyclopedia set, maybe get Encyclopedia Britannica, not the Oxford English Dictionary.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica

The Encyclopædia Britannica (Latin for 'British Encyclopaedia') is a general-knowledge English-language encyclopaedia. It has been published since 1768, and after several ownership changes is currently owned by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. The 2010 version of the 15th edition, which spans 32 volumes and 32,640 pages, was the last printed edition.[1] Since 2016, it has been published exclusively as an online encyclopaedia at the website Britannica.com.

We used the somewhat-smaller World Book Encyclopedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Book_Encyclopedia

The World Book Encyclopedia is an American encyclopedia.[1] World Book was first published in 1917. Since 1925, a new edition of the encyclopedia has been published annually.[1] Although published online in digital form for a number of years, World Book is currently the only American encyclopedia which also still provides a print edition.[2] The encyclopedia is designed to cover major areas of knowledge uniformly, but it shows particular strength in scientific, technical, historical and medical subjects.[3]

World Book, Inc. is based in Chicago, Illinois.[1] According to the company, the latest edition, World Book Encyclopedia 2024, contains more than 14,000 pages distributed along 22 volumes and also contains over 25,000 photographs.[4]

As of 2022, the only official sales outlet for the World Book Encyclopedia is the company's website; the official list price is $1,199.

I think that the idea of a large, expensive, many-volume print home reference work is probably fading into the past with the Internet, but it used to really be something of a norm.

The OED in print today costs $1,215, and you can still get the thing. So that's pretty comparable to the pre-Internet past.

They also sell online subscriptions for $100/year. I think that most people with a home set likely didn't bother to replace their encyclopedia or dictionary and just let it get out of date, so they probably didn't get an OED set and replace it every 12 years (well, discount the cost of financing there) so online access would cost more...but it's probably not wildly worse.

$100/year is definitely not worth it for me for OED access, but, then, neither is the print edition, and that's been the long-run norm for what someone would get if they wanted the OED.

Honestly...considers I don't think that I actually even have a print dictionary. I used to have a little vest-pocket dictionary that was floating around somewhere, but not a standard bookshelf reference. Just too many freely-available online ones. If I bought one, I probably would not buy the OED.

I do think that the paywall will make the OED less-relevant relative to other dictionaries.

But I don't think that the world is worse off now than it was when one had to go buy a large print book (or a 20-volume set of books, if that's how you swung) and then go haul it off the bookshelf when you wanted to reference it.