Illustrative quotations are drawn both from spoken Norwegian (with a geographical reference) and from literature.
Norsk Ordbok covers the neo-Norwegian period from 1600 onwards, though coverage for the first two centuries is scant, consisting mainly of records of spoken Norwegian.
Norsk Ordbok has good coverage of the period from 1850 onwards, the pioneer years of establishing Nynorsk as a written standard.
The collections on which Norsk Ordbok are based were started in 1930, and comprise some 3.2 million literary excerpts and dialect quotations.
Norsk Ordbok was reorganised in 2002 with a view to speed up editing, and should have been finished in 2014, to coincide with the bicentenary of the Norwegian constitution.