Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is a biography published by Oxford University Press. It contains biographies of people from the British Isles, from the earliest times to the recent past. He is the successor to the Dictionary of National Biography, published in 63 volumes between 1885 and 1900.

Sir Leslie Stephen, father of Virginia Woolf, was the first editor of the DNB. Appendices to the biography were published intermittently between 1901 and 1996 to include recent deaths, but no attempt was made to revise the entire work, which contained many Victorian texts, until 1992. Work then began on a new version with ' with editor Colin Matthew at the helm. This was published, in print and online, on 23 September 2004.

The number of biographies increased from 30,941 in the original DNB to 54,992 in the 2004 publication of the ODNB, and the number of authors from 653 to 12,550. The print version of the ODNB has 60 volumes; unlike the old DNB practice, these were all published jointly. The online version is revised three times each year.