Word trends and new words
Fnarr fnarr, phwoah, and mwah
Taking a first glance at a list of recent additions to a dictionary, most of us will instinctively seek out the very new. Sometimes it’s their simple sparkle of novelty that attracts – the latest updates to Oxford Dictionaries Online include ‘upcycling’, ‘surveilling’ and ‘wantaway’; others engage through the picture they give of the world [...]
New words in Oxford Dictionaries Online. Woot!
We’ve just added a buttload of new bloggable words to Oxford Dictionaries Online. But watch out, the new additions to the dictionary are so exciting you may be tempted to let your jazz hands loose… Fnarr fnarr! TMI coming into your feature phone Everyone seems to have a feature phone today, making communication on the [...]
Wake up and smell ODO’s latest additions!
There is very little that thrills the heart of a lexicographer quite so much as the smell of new words. Fresh, piquant, and uncluttered by the barnacle-like clichés that attach themselves to so many words which have been around for hundreds of years, these recent additions to the language breathe fresh life into it, and [...]
Shifted meanings: nice and egregious
Many of the words that have been in the English language for more than a few hundred years have shifted their meaning somewhat. The first meaning of the word secretary was exactly what it looks like it should be – someone who keeps secrets. And similarly, principal meant ‘of or belonging to a prince’ well before it [...]
Word trends – FAIL
Since its inception, the internet has been a rich source of new words (such as blogroll, chatterbot, cyberslacker, phishing, and tweetup) and meanings (such as browse, mouse, spider, cookie, and thread). Fail is a perfect example of an Internet-created word craze. It’s used in our everyday speech as a verb, and it has been used [...]
Your friendly neighbourhood Corpus
Shades of rhetoric: a hot-button word Much of the content and information found in Oxford dictionaries is provided by the Oxford English Corpus, a database of current English usage that has over two and a half billion words and is fully searchable, allowing shifts in meaning to be observed far more rapidly than they were [...]
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 [...]
The OUP UK Word of the Year is … ‘big society’
Let’s hear a woot (or not?) for the Big Society! Each year, as the announcement of Oxford’s Word of the Year approaches, I’m reminded of some words from the playwright Dennis Potter: ‘the trouble with words is that you never know whose mouth they’ve been in’. I sometimes wonder whether that’s why I like new [...]
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