I mentioned elsewhere that the OED has relaunched their online site as of Nov. 2010. they now refer to the Second Edition (1989 print edition) and the Online Edition, which is the virtual precursor to the official Third Edition. I have to say, not wanting to appear as though I'm flogging this, that they've really done it right this time. I've only just begun to explore it, but for starters, they now have a real Browse feature and they've added a Historical Thesaurus - "a taxonomic classification of the majority of senses and lemmas in OED Online". also, "The static, printed versions of entries published in OED2 are still available on the site for reference." They're obviously aiming at making this the ultimate research tool for the English language.

I'm chuffed.