[5] During the years immediately preceding the appearance of the first part of the dictionary (1898), Joseph Wright was widely regarded with scepticism concerning both the academic value of the project and its financial coverage.
However, Professor Walter William Skeat, founder and president of the English Dialect Society, had created a fund in 1886 (of which nearly half was his own money) for the initial collecting and arranging of the material for the dictionary.
Arthur Balfour, at the time First Lord of the Treasury, made a grant from the Royal Bounty Fund which helped to complete the work.
After years of nerve-racking hesitation and consultation, Wright finally decided for himself as editor to publish the dictionary by subscription at his own risk.
This intention required an enormous amount of activity to promote the planned dictionary and gaining distinguished persons and scholars as subscribers.
While he found further sponsors, e.g. Clarendon Press, which provided him rooms for a "workshop", he was compelled partially to finance the project himself.
The entries are of different length, ranging from cross-references to analyses of dialectal forms and meanings expanding over several pages.
Moreover, the Dictionary is very scrupulous in adding information on historical precursors of dialect words, including both etymology and morphology.
Unlike Alexander John Ellis's monumental work on Early English Pronunciation, Volume V, Wright’s Grammar is very condensed.
With the help of the Innsbruck interface, users can focus on different linguistic aspects of the Dictionary’s text beyond the mere headwords, in order to retrieve formally or semantically specific information based on the whole EDD.
The details of the enormous potential of EDD Online and the repercussions for a new concept of English dialectology are described in a monograph by Manfred Markus published in 2021.