Nine years before the Oxford English Dictionary was finally completed, Sir William Craigie proposed his scheme of period dictionaries. Pointing to the many problems in the language still unsolved, and to the “large quantities of interesting material” daily set aside because of the limitations of space, he insisted that this was the only way to meet completely the needs of scholars in English language and of serious students of our literature. Neither he nor the others who have taken up his proposal have ever conceived of these period dictionaries as works to supplant the Oxford Dictionary. They could not because they approach the language with essentially different purposes. Sir William Craigie in his report of 1919 phrases quite clearly the relationship of these later dictionaries to their parent: