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 [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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? [...]
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 [...]
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