quality:corruption, information:highlighting
Reception and criticism

British prime minister Stanley Baldwin described the OED as a "national treasure". Author Anu Garg, founder of Wordsmith.org, has called it a "lex icon". Tim Bray, co-creator of Extensible Markup Language (XML), credits the OED as the developing inspiration of that markup language.

However, despite its claims of authority, the dictionary has been criticized since the 1960s because of its scope, its claims to authority, its British-centredness and relative neglect of World Englishes, its implied but unacknowledged focus on literary language and, above all, its influence. The OED, as a commercial product, has always had to steer a line between scholarship and marketing. In his review of the 1982 supplement, University of Oxford linguist Roy Harris writes that criticizing the OED is extremely difficult because "one is dealing not just with a dictionary but with a national institution", one that "has become, like the English monarchy, virtually immune from criticism in principle". He further notes that neologisms from respected "literary" authors such as Samuel Beckett and Virginia Woolf are included, whereas usage of words in newspapers or other less "respectable" sources hold less sway, even though they may be commonly used. He writes that the OED ' s "lack-and-white lexicography is also black-and-white in that it takes upon itself to pronounce authoritatively on the rights and wrongs of usage", faulting the dictionary's prescriptive rather than descriptive usage.

To Harris, this prescriptive classification of certain usages as "erroneous" and the complete omission of various forms and usages cumulatively represent the "social bias" of the (presumably well-educated and wealthy) compilers. However, the Guide to the Third Edition of the OED has stated that " Oxford English Dictionary is not an arbiter of proper usage, despite its widespread reputation to the contrary" and that the dictionary "is intended to be descriptive, not prescriptive". The identification of "erroneous and catachrestic" usages is being removed from third edition entries, sometimes in favour of usage notes describing the attitudes to language which have previously led to these classifications. Another avenue of criticism is the dictionary's non-inclusion of etymologies for words of AAVE or African language origin such as jazz, dig or badmouth (the latter two are possibly of Wolof and Mandinka languages, respectively). As of 2022, OUP is preparing a specialized Oxford Dictionary of African American English in collaboration with Harvard University 's Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, with literary critic Henry Louis Gates Jr. being the project's editor-in-chief.

Harris also faults the editors' "donnish conservatism" and their adherence to prudish Victorian morals, citing as an example the non-inclusion of "various centuries-old ' four-letter words ' " until 1972. However, no English dictionary included such profanity, for fear of possible prosecution under British obscenity laws, until after the conclusion of the Lady Chatterley's Lover obscenity trial in 1960. The Penguin English Dictionary of 1965 was the first dictionary that included the word fuck. Joseph Wright 's English Dialect Dictionary had included shit in 1905.

The OED ' s claims of authority have also been questioned by linguists such as Pius ten Hacken, who notes that the dictionary actively strives toward definitiveness and authority but can only achieve those goals in a limited sense, given the difficulties of defining the scope of what it includes.

Founding editor James Murray was also reluctant to include scientific terms, despite their documentation, unless he felt that they were widely enough used. In 1902, he declined to add the word radium to the dictionary.