Take our Concise Centenary quiz

To celebrate one hundred years of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, try your luck at our quiz!

For a hundred years the Concise has been a record of all aspects of the English language; from the vulgar to the colloquial and from the formal to the technical.  Where do certain words come from? What do some of those odd expressions we use really mean? The First Edition of the Concise published in 1911 contains some fascinating examples of Edwardian language usage and some amusing out-dated expressions. Did you know that a growlery was a private room or a place to growl in? Or that jobbernowl was a term for a stupid person?

Each edition of the Concise has shown the development of new words. In the new twelfth edition we see the addition of new terms such as social media and gastric band, but when did more familiar words such as pizza, cinema, and plastic first officially appear?

Explore some weird and wonderful aspects of our language and test your knowledge of the history of words.

Posted on: August 17 2011 | Categories: Competitions and quizzes, Dictionaries and lexicography, Interactive features | Tags: centenary, Concise Oxford English Dictionary, quiz