This paper offers a brief survey of some important developments in the use of computers in making dictionaries and lexicons. Making a dictionary involves collecting the data, sorting and lemmatizing, editing and printing. Five major types of machine-readable dictionaries have developed from these procedures: Machine Readable Lexicons of individual authors, Machine Readable Dictionaries with codes for linguistic information, Machine Dictionaries with selected information, and Lexical Databases with lexical information abstracted from machine-readable dictionaries. The second edition of the QED is a machine-readable dictionary with codes that may provide the basis for a diachronic lexical database.