Posts by Oxford Dictionaries
Compliment or complement?
A lot of people get these two words confused. It’s easy to see why: they’re pronounced in the same way and have very similar spellings but they have completely different meanings. If you compliment someone, you are expressing admiration for them, or praising them for something. Here are some examples from the Oxford English Corpus showing the [...]
It’s all meme, me me…
When Richard Dawkins coined the word meme in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, he wanted a word like gene that conveyed the way in which ideas and behaviour spread within society by non-genetic means: The new soup is the soup of human culture. We need a name for the new replicator, a noun which [...]
Mother’s Day
This Sunday we celebrate Mother’s Day in the UK: that day of the year on which mothers are particularly honoured by their children. In North America and South Africa it is the second Sunday in May; in Britain it has become another term for Mothering Sunday. According to A Dictionary of English Folklore as cited [...]
-ize or -ise?
Many people visiting the World (non-US) version of our website ask us why we spell words such as realize, finalize, and organize with ‘-ize’ spellings, rather than ‘-ise’. There’s a widespread belief that these spellings belong only to American English, and that British English should use the ‘-ise’ forms instead, i.e. realise, finalise, and organise. [...]
Affect versus effect
Every month, affect is one of the most searched-for words in Oxford Dictionaries Online. Its high ranking in our search logs is probably because a lot of people are confused about the difference between affect and effect, two words which have almost the same spelling, but very different meanings. The basic difference between them is [...]
Word trends: viral
Viral now has more meanings than it used to. In the twentieth century, you would only have encountered this word in the physiological context of diseases: Rabies is an acute viral infection that is extremely rare in the UK. A quarter of the residents had high levels of viral hepatitis. In the twenty-first century, most [...]
International Women’s Day
To celebrate International Women’s Day, here is an extract on feminism from the Dictionary of Critical Theory, edited by Ian Buchanan. Please note that links in this extract are to the dictionary entries in Oxford Dictionaries Online. Feminism One of the most important social movements of the past two centuries and certainly the social movement [...]
Are you a n00b or a netizen?
Do you think a cookie is just something in your kitchen (or your tummy)? Would it surprise you to hear that phishing is an illegal activity? To you, is ‘browse history’ something you did during school when you were assigned more reading than you wanted to do? Volumes have been written on the effects of [...]
Blog categories
- Competitions and quizzes (27)
- Dictionaries and lexicography (121)
- English in use (316)
- Grammar and writing help (59)
- Interactive features (46)
- OED Appeals (4)
- Other languages (55)
- Varieties of English (30)
- Word origins (161)
- Word trends and new words (96)
