Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Collins English Dictionary was first published in 1979, with Patrick Hanks as editor and Laurence Urdang as editorial director. It was the first British English dictionary to be typeset from the output of a computer database.
The 14th edition, published on the 31st of August 2023, contains more than 732,000 words, meanings, and phrases. It also includes 9,500 place names and 7,300 biographies.
The Collins Corpus is a continually updated body of language that underpins the dictionary's research and now contains over 20 billion words. It allows editors to base definitions and citations on real-world usage rather than invented examples.
CollinsDictionary.com launched on the 31st of December 2011, making the dictionary freely accessible on the web. It launched alongside translation dictionaries between English and French, German, Spanish, and Italian.
The Collins English Dictionary is published by HarperCollins in Glasgow. It has been published there since its first edition in 1979.
CollinsDictionary.com introduced crowd-sourcing for neologisms in August 2012, while maintaining editorial control to remain distinct from Wiktionary and Urban Dictionary. A discussion forum for neologisms had been in place since 2004.