Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Collins English Dictionary launched as a printed volume in 1979. This specific edition marked a turning point for British lexicography and was edited by Patrick Hanks with Laurence Urdang acting as editorial director.
Language research drives the dictionary through the Collins Corpus system which contains over 20 billion words. Editors use the Bank of English established by John McHardy Sinclair at COBUILD to replace invented scenarios with authentic citations from actual usage.
The unabridged Collins English Dictionary appeared online on the 31st of December 2011 via CollinsDictionary.com. That launch included unabridged dictionaries for French, German, Spanish, and Italian languages along with word frequencies derived from the Google Ngrams project.
The current fourteenth edition published on the 31st of August 2023 contained more than 732,000 words, meanings, and phrases. This count excludes headwords and includes specific place names and biographies alongside 9,500 place names and 7,300 biographical entries.
A special thirty-year anniversary tenth edition appeared in 2010 to mark the milestone. Earlier editions typically release once every three or four years while a newer version of the fourteenth edition followed shortly after on the 7th of May 2024.