The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) contains definitions, comprehensive etymologies, and illustrative quotations (2.4 million of them) for over half a million words. The reference section is identical to that of the 20-volume print edition. Within main and subsidiary headwords, you can search for words or phrases, variant forms, Greek words, or the phonetic forms of words; within quotations, for the quotation date, author, the title of the source, or a word or phrase within the text of the quote; within etymologies, for languages, foreign words, or a word or phrase within the explanatory text; and within definitions, for any word or words.
Searching, however, is neither intuitive nor easy. For starters, all searches must be initiated from the Search window or the List window. In some cases it doesn’t matter which one you use. In other cases, the manual recommends that you not use the Search window. A more difficult problem is that you get no spelling help. If it can’t find a word, OED finds the closest alphabetical match, which is usually irrelevant. Equally inconvenient is the fact that some multiword headwords (such as academic freedom) are in one search area and some are in another, so two searches are often required simply to look up a phrase.
OED’s search algorithm also has problems. A search for two (or more) words in the quotations, etymologies, definitions, or whole dictionary, for example, can give vastly different results depending on the order in which you list the words. Worse still, such multiword ffeetext searches frequently fail to find entries that clearly fulfill the search criteria. Wild-card searches sometimes fail to find obvious matches. But the most serious flaw is that there is no easy and reliable way to search two or more areas at once (to search for Nahuatl in the etymologies and spear-thrower in the definitions to find the entry for atlatl, for example). You can conduct a free-text search, but this method frequently fails to find qualifying entries (as in the search above, which fails to find atlatl). Or you can use the program’s built-in “query language.” Neither of these alternatives is acceptable.
Proper Macintosh design is seriously lacking. The scroll arrows at the tops and bottoms of scroll bars, for example, don’t scroll the window; they move the highlight bar up and down. The Font Colour dialog box (which establishes the text color for the parts of each entry) uses radio buttons to open subsidiary dialog boxes rather than turn options on and off. In the Part of Speech filter, deselecting all parts of speech tells OED to search for all of them, not none of them. And the automatic addition of three-letter extensions at the ends of file names (such as Quotation.Quo) is clearly leftover DOS programming.
Some parts of the program are poorly designed, and other parts don’t work reliably. If you try to select two or more items in the List window, sometimes you get what you want, sometimes you get less, and sometimes you get more. Occasionally the program chokes on a word (such as tongucy whose entry I have yet to see) and simply quits. And depending on your printer, you may have no luck printing entries. When you copy an entry to your word processor, OED strips the copied entry of all formatting.
Finally, there’s the issue of help. The manual is incomplete, often unclear, and sometimes inaccurate. Worse, the number you call for technical support leads, in fact, to the marketing department, and I have yet to hear from them. The most attractive aspect is the price. At $895, the difference between it and the print edition (at $2750) is breathtaking. But for software this expensive, the flaws, omissions, and unreliability are simply too great.
Eckhardt, Robert C. (April 1994). The Oxford English Dictionary. Macworld. (pg. 77).
Oxford University Press
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Oxford_English_Dictionary_2nd_Edition_1.0d.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Basilisk II
