Posts by Oxford Dictionaries
Search monitor: what were your top ODO lookups in January?
As part of our occasional search monitor series, here’s a clickable word cloud displaying about 350 of your most-viewed words in Oxford Dictionaries Online during January 2011. It brightened up our day no end (in fact, we were even a little discombobulated) to see that vomitorium had emerged at the top of the pile for [...]
Which word is older?
There are a number of people who decry some of the recent additions to the English language, contending that the new vocabulary is nothing more than a bunch of nonsense words that some computer-addicted kids made up (what is a w00t, anyway?). Yet when we view some of these words out of context, it can [...]
Cheer yourself up with Oxford Dictionaries Online
The third Monday in January is allegedly the most depressing day of the year. We can see why: Christmas festivities are but a memory (apart from maybe an extra inch or two round the waist), we’ve just given up on our New Year’s resolutions, it feels like a long time since payday, and it’s been cold and miserable for as long as we can remember.
NEW OXFORD AMERICAN DICTIONARY’S 2010 WORD OF THE YEAR IS…
REFUDIATE Followers of Sarah Palin’s Twitter account will undoubtedly recognize the New Oxford American Dictionary’s Word of the Year for 2010: refudiate verb used loosely to mean “reject”: she called on them to refudiate the proposal. [origin — blend of refute and repudiate] Refudiate: A Historical Perspective An unquestionable buzzword in 2010, the word refudiate [...]
The Burds and the Bees
Sarah Palin, the once and (perhaps) future candidate for higher political office, recently discovered the perils of neologizing, when she several times used the previously unknown word refudiate in a series of tweets about the potential building of a mosque near ground zero in Manhattan. The condemnation of her word choice was swift and brutal, and [...]
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