The Oxford University Press is Oxford's largest employer in the printing and publishing trades with nearly 1,000 staff. The 1985 turnover was around £30 million in publishing and £6-£7 million in printing, more than half of which goes on export. It has 16,500 titles, including sheet music, and a turnover of over 1,000 new titles each year, mostly academic works.

The first volume of the Oxford English Dictionary was produced in the 1880s, with the twelve volumes being completed in 1928. The supplements took about another 30 years. From the OED have sprung a whole family of dictionaries, including the Shorter, the Concise, the Little, the Pocket and the Mini, as well as several designed especially for schools.

About twenty people are employed in a separate Dictionary Department on a continuous updating process, and it is up to the editor of each dictionary to decide which words should be included. With the increase of international communications, the language is changing faster all the time, and there are usually more new words requiring inclusion than those which have fallen into disuse. Decisions are based on usage in current magazines, newspapers and other literature.