Dictionaries and lexicography
Cricket and the Queen Mum: the OED’s Chief Editor discusses some fascinating words
Yesterday it was announced that John Simpson, Chief Editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, will be retiring in October 2013. The full press release can be read on the OED website, and it seems an appropriate time to ask John Simpson to discuss some of the more fascinating words and expressions he has worked on: It’s hard [...]
Play ball!
In spring, as the saying goes, “a young man’s fancy lightly turns to love.” Who first penned that immortal mush, anyway? You well-read literary types probably know it was Alfred Lord Tennyson, in his poem “Locksley Hall,” and I suppose that was romantic of him, but the way I see it, when love becomes a [...]
Celebrate National Library Week with free access to the OED and Oxford Reference
Celebrate National Library Week with free access to the OED and Oxford Reference, available to everyone in North and South America through the 20th of April. Visit either site and use Username: libraryweek / Password: libraryweek to login and access everything the sites have to offer. Everyone will have access through the same login and no registration of any kind is [...]
Johnson and Grose: lexicography’s odd couple
April 15 marks the anniversary of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755), a work that’s today universally recognized as an astonishing feat of solo lexicography. The publication, in 1755, rightly attracted great attention; David Garrick wrote a poetic eulogy to mark the achievement in the Public Advertiser, describing Johnson as ‘like a hero [...]
Volcanoes in the OED
Within the dictionary offices, we refer to the Oxford English Dictionary‘s recently revised and updated batch of words as the blue batch, as blue is the leading headword. Colour words are often big entries, involving many different subject areas. Here, we have natural history (bluebell, blueberry, and blue heron, to name but three), country music (bluegrass), fashion (or not) (blue jeans, blue [...]
Music to my ears: 5 composers and how to pronounce them
How many foreign languages can you Handel? Shall we make a Liszt? Ok, ok, we’ll stop before you start Chopin our heads off. All punnery aside, clicking through the pages of a music dictionary like Grove Music Online, one is presented with a wide selection of head-scratching-inducing names. Here are some of our favorites: Camille [...]
Better the weather you know: proverbs and quotations about the weather
22 March is World Water Day, and 23 March is World Meteorological Day, so what better time to celebrate our fascination with foreboding forecasts? Threatening thunderstorms and disconcerting downpours crop up time and time again in popular proverbs and quotations, and not least because of the abundance of words that rhyme with ‘rain’. Perhaps the [...]
David Crystal’s favourite words
David Crystal is one of the world’s greatest authorities on the English language and has written many books on the subject. The forthcoming book Wordsmiths and Warriors by David and Hilary Crystal explores the heritage of English through the places in Britain that shaped it [...]
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