Tag archives: new words
The life of slang… dot com
At my son’s recent tenth birthday party, I was struck by differences in the slang used between two groups of friends from different schools. We tend to think of slang as ‘British’, ‘American’, or ‘Australian’ or perhaps as belonging to sub-groups like teenagers or rappers, but it isn’t really that simple because individual social networks [...]
What were the most looked-up words in 2011?
In our occasional search monitor series, we take a look at your most searched-for words of the past month. But what were your top look-ups for the past year? Below is a word cloud containing the top 300 most looked-up words in our free online dictionary. Hover over the words to find out more or [...]
Could -boat be the new -gate?
Word in the news: Romney-boated On New Year’s Day this year, Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, expressing frustration at negative ads being run by pro-Romney groups, said “I feel Romney-boated”, coining a phrase and – just maybe – launching a new combining form. Gingrich’s neologism uses the second element in swift-boating, a term which dates [...]
The lexicon of consumerism and America’s Christmas season
For those of us immersed in preparations for Christmas, the time remaining feels insufficiently brief, and the few weeks since Thanksgiving seem more like a few days. As fleeting as time is between Turkey Day and December 25, we in the US possess a peculiarly American interpretation of when the Christmas season “begins.” My British [...]
Slactivism, dadrock, and bibimbap: ODO quarterly update November 2011
This year’s momentous events have had an impact on the new additions to our online dictionary. Arab Spring, describing the series of anti-government uprisings in various countries in North Africa and the Middle East, is now included, as well as phone hacking, the scandal which caused a storm in the UK that reverberated all the [...]
Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2011: ‘squeezed middle’
You’d think that choosing the standout word of the year would be a contentious affair. So many possibilities, you’d guess, and so many linguistic loves, hates, and indifferences to deal with amongst those who debate it. The truth is that, normally, choosing the word of the year is a slam dunk. Take ‘bling’, the obvious [...]
Reports of the death of the cassette tape are greatly exaggerated
A few months back Oxford University Press received a good deal of attention in response to an announcement about new words that would be added to the 12th edition of the Concise Oxford Dictionary (among them mankini, cyberbullying, and retweet). While the responses were largely positive, there was a certain amount of disquiet, which is [...]
Of moms and men: what two small words reveal about big social changes
The Oxford English Dictionary’s evidence files reveal an interesting trend: in recent years, the number of phrases designating types of mothers (on the model of [X] mother) has grown much faster than the number of comparable terms for fathers. Since 1990, OED has tracked roughly 40% more maternal terms than their paternal counterparts. But why [...]
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