Short answers, pulled from the story.
Work on the Oxford English Dictionary began in June 1857, when the Philological Society formed an "Unregistered Words Committee" to search for words missing from existing dictionaries. The society formally adopted the plan for a comprehensive new dictionary on the 7th of January 1858. Publication of the first fascicle did not begin until 1884.
The second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, published in March 1989, comprises 20 volumes with 21,730 pages and 290,500 entries. It contains 2,412,400 usage quotations, 249,300 etymologies, and 577,000 cross-references.
The four principal editors of the first edition were James Murray, Henry Bradley, William Craigie, and Charles Talbut Onions. Murray was responsible for nearly half the dictionary and died in 1915 before the work was finished. Bradley died in 1923; only Craigie and Onions lived to see the first edition completed in 1928.
As of 2011, the longest entry in the OED is for the verb "run", with 645 senses. The record was previously held by "set" in the second edition (580 senses, described in 60,000 words), then broken by "make" in 2000, "put" in 2007, and "run" in 2011.
William Shakespeare is the most-quoted writer in the completed first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, with "Hamlet" his most-cited individual work. The most-quoted female writer is George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans). The most-quoted single text overall is "Cursor Mundi".
The CEO of Oxford University Press has stated that a printed third edition is unlikely. The third edition is expected to be available exclusively in electronic form. Work began in 2000 and is projected to be completed around 2037 at a cost of approximately 34 million pounds.