Tag archives: Oxford Children’s Corpus
Lol or pulchritudinous: which words do children really use in their writing?
’Twas a caliginous night. . . Fingers on your buzzers, please. Which of the following would you expect children today to use in their writing: gr8, lol, apotropaic, caliginous, cerulean? Yes, that’s right, the last three. This is just one of the happy findings from the BBC Radio 2 500 Words short story competition, run [...]
28 million words, one corpus, and thousands of fascinating insights
Have you ever been told as a child to ‘stop daydreaming’ and pay attention? Then you will be interested to know that daydreaming is a word that is invariably used in a negative context by adults but in a much more positive sense by children. Examples from the Oxford English Corpus (a vast electronic collection [...]
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