Competitions and quizzes
A limerick competition for Mother’s Day: win an iPod Touch
The appreciation for limericks, such as Edward Lear’s nonsense verses, is well-documented here on the OxfordWords blog. As is an appreciation for mothers. Since Mother’s Day and Limerick Day coincide this year in the US, what better way to celebrate both than with a mom-themed limerick competition? (The competition is, of course, open worldwide.) How [...]
Bible or Bard?
23 April, as every schoolchild knows, is probably the birthday, and definitely the deathday, of England’s most famous writer: William Shakespeare, often known simply as the Bard. (We don’t know his exact birth date, but he was baptized on 26 April, and it lends his life an appropriately poetic balance to assume he was born [...]
Vampires say the funniest things! A quiz of quotations from famous bloodsuckers
Like those of the creature itself, the origins of the word vampire are somewhat mysterious. The word comes to English from the Hungarian, perhaps having its roots in a Turkish word for a witch. It was introduced into English around the early 1700s in fascinating accounts of European legends. A little later in the same [...]
How well do you speak money?
When the US Congress passed the original National Currency Act on February 25, 1863, a single currency for the United States of America was established for the first time. This momentous event not only brought the nation together economically, it also ushered in completely new and dynamic ways to talk about money. The Oxford English [...]
Tolkien’s etymologies
I’m tremendously excited about the film version of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit that’s coming out in the UK this week. As a child, my favourite film was the 1978 animated version of The Lord of the Rings by Ralph Bakshi. When I say it was my favourite, I suppose I mean that it [...]
Jane or Jones?
Jane Austen’s novels and letters are frequently cited in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), putting her work currently as the 253rd most frequently quoted source in the OED, with a total of 1,620 quotations. Of these quotations, 44 currently provide the very first evidence of a particular word, including the adjective ‘fragmented’ (from Northanger Abbey: [...]
What kind of writer are you?
Writing styles are as distinct as personality traits—and debates about which way of writing is “best” can often be just as volatile. Where one writer might luxuriate in the complexities and varieties of the lexicon, another might prefer to tell it like it is in the most familiar way possible. Such was the case, in [...]
Interactive etymology quiz
How much do you really know about where your vocabulary comes from? Do you know your Latin roots from your Greek ones? How about Japanese from Cantonese? Hebrew from Hawaiian? Test your knowledge in our interactive etymology quiz and find out if you are a student, an amateur or an expert etymologist. Etymologies Quiz Game [...]
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