As previously, the vocabulary included entries in general English from 1700 to the present day and in earlier major literary works. The dictionary now included 600,000 words, phrases, and definitions, covering global English-speaking regions and 2500 new words and meanings from Oxford Dictionaries and Oxford English Corpus. On 21 September 2007, the sixth edition appeared. The name Shorter Oxford English Dictionary was used to emphasize the link between this two-volume dictionary and the original twenty-volume OED.
The fifth edition was published in 2002, and contains more than half a million definitions, with 83,500 illustrative quotations from 7,000 authors.
The book attempted to include all English words which had substantial currency after 1700, plus the vocabulary of Shakespeare, John Milton, Edmund Spenser and the King James Version.
The whole text was completely revised for the Fourth Edition, which was published in 1993 as the New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. The New SOED was prepared under the editorship of Lesley Brown 1980-1993 and was the first complete revision of the dictionary and should be considered a re-abridgement of the SOED and its supplements.