Tag archives: OED

Tweet geekery and epic crowdsourcing: an Oxford English Dictionary update

Today the Oxford English Dictionary announces its latest update, which sees the inclusion of over 1200 newly revised and updated words. The additions bring the OED’s total number of entries – including headwords, sub-senses, phrases, and compounds – to over 823,000. Let’s take a look at some of the most intriguing words included in the OED [...]

Posted on: June 13 2013 | Comments: 99 | Categories: Dictionaries and lexicography | Tags: , , , ,

Which Winston? Confusable names in the OED

Thomas Hardy was born on 22 May 1804. “But wait,” I hear you cry, clutching the Dictionary of National Biography to your chest, fanning yourself down with a copy of The Mayor of Casterbridge, clasping an edition of – no, sorry, you’ve run out of hands – “Thomas Hardy was born on 2 June 1840, [...]

Posted on: May 22 2013 | Posted by: | Comments: 0 | Categories: Dictionaries and lexicography | Tags: , , , ,

Beam me up, dictionary: Star Trek in the OED

Star Trek is one of the most successful science-fiction franchises of all time: since the original TV series first aired in 1966, there have been four further live-action TV shows (plus an animated series), twelve films, and innumerable books. Only Star Wars and (particularly for the British) Doctor Who have achieved a comparable level of [...]

Posted on: May 17 2013 | Comments: 1 | Categories: English in use, Word origins, Word trends and new words | Tags: , , ,

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 [...]

Posted on: April 25 2013 | Comments: 1 | Categories: Dictionaries and lexicography | Tags: , ,

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 [...]

Posted on: April 4 2013 | Comments: 0 | Categories: Dictionaries and lexicography, English in use, Word origins, Word trends and new words | Tags: , , ,

Mumbo-jumbo and plocking: Vita Sackville-West in the OED

On 9 March 2013, Vita Sackville-West would have been 121 years old. By birth she was a Victorian, but she spent her life railing against the stifling conventions of her parents’ generation. She and her husband Harold Nicolson enjoyed a famously open marriage; one of Vita Sackville-West’s many lovers was the novelist Virginia Woolf, who [...]

Posted on: March 11 2013 | Comments: 3 | Categories: English in use | Tags: , ,

Genes and genetics: the language of scientific discovery

It is sometimes the case that a scientific field experiences such dramatic progress that the rate at which new discoveries are made outpaces the language needed to describe them. How would it be if there were no words to describe the results of your latest experiment or the structures you see using your new microscope? [...]

Posted on: February 20 2013 | Comments: 0 | Categories: English in use | Tags: , , ,

What the Nobel laureates did for us

19 February isn’t a great day, should you happen to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Chances are, you might meet your maker – Nobel laureates André Gide and Knut Hamsun both died on 19 February, in 1951 and 1952 respectively. And that’s before we widen the net to other Nobel Prizes (step forward [...]

Posted on: February 19 2013 | Posted by: | Comments: 0 | Categories: Dictionaries and lexicography | Tags: , , , , ,

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