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This is chiefly the correspondence of Charles C. Fries, Editor of the EMED, whose main correspondents included Hope Emily Allen (a well known independent scholar who worked for the EMED for a time), Sir W. A. Craigie (former editor of the OED, editor at the time of the Dictionary of American English on Historical Principles at the University of Chicago and the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue in Edinburgh), Kenneth Sisam (Assistant Secretary to the Delegates of the Oxford University Press), David H. Stevens (of the General Education Board in New York), and various officials of the American Council of Learned Societies, the Modern Language Association of America, the University of Michigan, etc. In addition to Fries, sometimes Thomas A. Knott, Editor of the MMED, and occasionally other editors and staff members, answered letters. The correspondence is arranged alphabetically by correspondent, and each correspondent's letters are arranged chronologically, from earliest to latest. For additional EMED correspondence by Fries and Associate Editor Hereward T. Price see box 7.

From 1930 to 1939 most of the administration for the EMED was combined with that for the MED, and much of the relevant material can be found in boxes 3 and 4. For Budget and Salaries, for example, Fries for the EMED along with Moore and then Knott for the MED submitted joint budgets. The EMED received grants during its early years (1929 on) from the General Education Board and the Rockefeller Foundation, but that external support ended in June of 1936, and the University of Michigan had to assume the full cost of both the MED and the EMED. The financial limitations were partly responsible for the decisions first, in 1938, to suspend work on the MED and set the staffs of both the MED and the EMED to editing for the EMED and then, a year later, to resume work on the MED and postpone the EMED indefinitely (see the file Division of Work between MED and EMED 1938-1939 in box 3). Similarly, a single Committee on Dictionaries made decisions for both the EMED and the MED, and Annual Reports were joint affairs. In addition to the combined files in boxes 3 and 4, see box 7 for a few specific EMED files on the same subjects.