Interactive features
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 [...]
Solve-it-yourself mysteries #94: the crossword
“Hooray! Hooray! Hooray! Hooray! ‘The Cross Word Puzzle Book’ is out today.” – F. P. Adams, ‘The Conning Tower’, New York World In April 1924, Simon and Schuster burst onto the New York publishing scene with The Cross Word Puzzle Book, which soon became a bestseller. The crossword was ten years old at the time, and had been gaining [...]
Baby Names Generator: from Amelia to Zebedee
Spring is fast approaching, and with this comes new life (in the animal and plant world anyway), so what better season than spring to launch our fantastic new Baby Name Generator! Our generator has been specially designed to help you choose the perfect name for your future baby, boy or girl, hypothetical or about to [...]
A comic quotation quiz
Moliere wrote in La critique de l’école des femmes (1663) that ‘it’s an odd job, making decent people laugh.’ In the hopes that 2013 will be filled with delightful oddity and humor, we present this quiz, drawn from the Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations. Edited by the late Ned Sherrin, the dictionary compiles words of [...]
A Christmas Carol text analyser
A Christmas Carol was first published 169 years ago, on 19 December 1843. It tells the story of Ebenezer Scrooge, a bad-tempered skinflint who hates Christmas and all it stands for, and his transformation after a ghostly visitor pays Scrooge a visit one Christmas Eve. A Christmas Carol was met with instant success and was [...]
Quaffing and scoffing tool: pairing festive foods with wine
Have you got that festive feeling? An urge to eat, drink, and be merry? Prepare for your seasonal celebrations with our food and wine pairing tool with a difference. Not only can you discover what you should be scoffing to complement your quaffing but you can also learn a fascinating food or wine language fact [...]
What were your top dictionary look-ups of the last three months?
Every so often, as part of our search monitor series, we take a look at the most looked-up words on Oxford Dictionaries Online over a certain period. Here, our list spans August to October of this year to show you which were the most popular words of the last few months. Hella ridic new lookups [...]
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