Interactive features
Mapping the origins of English
Today’s English owes much to many of the world’s languages, from French and German to Chinese and Hindi. Our interactive map below is the first of an occasional series which will offer you a glimpse of the range of linguistic influences that English has absorbed.
Click on the map to see how English has been shaped by French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Flemish. Your armchair travels should give you some interesting discoveries: could you guess the origins of fluff, anchovy, vamoose, and baize?
Goals galore but no parrots: a hundred-word football vocabulary
Fabio Capello, the Italian-born England football manager, was recently reported as saying that he could manage his players with just one hundred words of English. At the time there was much speculation as to which hundred words he would need to achieve this, and the BBC contacted Oxford Dictionaries for a list of the [...]
Author? Author?
We might spend our days on the Net, but we all love books at Oxford Dictionaries Online. Here’s an interactive quiz in honour of World Book Day, which gives a selection of words to be matched up with the authors who invented them. Think that Oscar Wilde coined the word witticism? Click to play and [...]
An interactive guide to Prince William’s ancestry
Prince William, or to give him his full name, William Arthur Philip Louis Windsor, is the eldest son of Prince Charles and Diana, Princess of Wales, and is second in line to the British throne, after his father. William was born on 21 June 1982 and met Catherine Elizabeth (‘Kate’) Middleton (born 9 January 1982), his bride-to-be, while studying at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Blog categories
- Competitions and quizzes (26)
- Dictionaries and lexicography (115)
- English in use (303)
- Grammar and writing help (58)
- Interactive features (46)
- OED Appeals (4)
- Other languages (49)
- Varieties of English (28)
- Word origins (156)
- Word trends and new words (92)
