He also increased coverage of slang, colloquialisms and scientific and technical terms.
In the 1970s, to the dismay of lexical purists, Maori terms such as kete and pakeha, began to appear in the Concise Oxford Dictionary.
And he soon discovered that nothing has the power to arouse people's passions so much as words.
He received anonymous death threats from groups wishing to suppress racial vocabulary or to remove male chauvinism from the language.
One letter read: "You won't know where or when, but you'll be dead."
He was born into a humble Whanganui household on January 29 1923.
His parents had but one book in the house, a socialist tract.
But after primary schooling his natural ability earned him a place at Wanganui Technical College (now City College) from 1934 to 1939.
Then came Victoria University in Wellington from 1940 to 1941 before he broke off studies for wartime service in the Royal New Zealand Artillery, two years of which were in Italy.
This changed his life. In Trieste, he chanced upon Frederick Bodmer's The Loom Of Language, which gave him a relish for words and their origins.
He returned to Wellington, completed his master's in 1948, won a Rhodes Scholarship in 1949 and graduated from Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1951 as one of a wave of Kiwi linguists to reach the university in those times.
But in 1957, things took another turn, with the offer of editing the Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary which occupied him until 1986.
In between times he produced other, somewhat shorter volumes including the New Zealand Pocket Oxford Dictionary and volume five of the Cambridge History Of The English Language in 1994.
The Chicago Tribune hailed Burchfield as "the greatest living lexicographer".
In 1986 the Wanganui City Council gave him Freedom of the City.
Dr Burchfield died in July, 2004.
