That understanding was one of the things that made the Oxford English Dictionary such a revolutionary undertaking in its time.
There was once a movement within English society to create a formal board of academics who would govern the proper use of the English language, as the French had already done at the time.
The OED took a different approach, crowdsourcing the enormous effort to document how the English language was used in practice without any pretense or judgment about how the language should be used.
