The dictionary began as a Philological Society project of a small group of intellectuals in London (and unconnected to Oxford University):[15]:103–4,112 Richard Chenevix Trench, Herbert Coleridge, and Frederick Furnivall, who were dissatisfied with the existing English dictionaries.
The Society expressed interest in compiling a new dictionary as early as 1844,[16] but it was not until June 1857 that they began by forming an "Unregistered Words Committee" to search for words that were unlisted or poorly defined in current dictionaries. In November.