I've been reading, off again, on again, a good book by John Willinsky, Empire of Words: The Regin of the OED. It's a study of how words made it into the OED. An example I remember from the first OED's editor's biography, (Caught in the Web of Words: James Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary by his grandaughter K M Elizabeth Murray), Murray had made a decision to exclude many of the newer medical and scientific words being coined at the time as part of the OED's policy. He called them "crack-jaw" words. That's how appendicitis didn't make it into volume A. In 1902, Edward VII's coronation was postponed when he had an operation to remove his appendix, but the OED had to wait until its supplement was printed to include this word.