Further restrictions would allow you to see all the first citations: usages first attested in this work. Almost 4,000 citations is a lot for one work. This gives all sorts of useful information about the contribution of Paradise Lost to the formation of the OED. Here, for instance is a screen-shot of what the current OED3 online interface gives for a search of “Paradise Lost” in the quotation title: Since then, if you have more than a passing interest in the OED, you’ve probably used the online “Advanced Search” function, which allows all sorts of queries of OED data. One could, for the first time, find something like, “all words which have citation evidence from Paradise Lost,” for example.
When the OED was first made available in electronic form in 1989, one of the most impressive things must have been the ability to search the dictionary using parameters other than the alphabetic placement of the headword. This lets you see how different parts of a work have factored in the compiling of the dictionary – as if you were looking at the text through the collective eyes of all the OED readers, lexicographers, and editors over the last 130 years or so. I’ve written a little program that annotates texts according to how much the Oxford English Dictionary cites them.
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