NOAD is based upon the New Oxford Dictionary of English (NODE), published in the United Kingdom in 1998, although with substantial editing, additional entries, and the inclusion of illustrations.

It is based on a corpus linguistics analysis of Oxford's 200 million word database of contemporary American English.

NOAD includes a diacritical respelling scheme to convey pronunciations, as opposed to the Gimson phonemic IPA system that is used in NODE.

The dictionary includes an entry for the word "esquivalience", which it defines as meaning "the willful avoidance of one's official responsibilities".

New Yorker contributing editor Henry Alford combed the section, and discussed several unusual entries he found with a group of American lexicographers.