Tag archives: poll
How do you pronounce scone?
If you’re ever looking to liven up a tea party with some fully-fledged warfare, then can I suggest that you try something subtler than putting salt in the sugar bowl or pushing someone down the stairs? Simply point to the curranty baked goods on the Cath Kidston three-tiered cake stand, and ask: “Scone or scone?” [...]
March Madness: The Final Four
While the British and American heads of state were busy fine-tuning their own March Madness bracket picks over dinner last week, the Oxford Dictionaries Bracket Challenge has already hit its stride. How did your favorite sports expressions do? The gloves are off In the closest match-up yet, the venerable saved by the bell proved to [...]
The Madness of March and the Oxford Dictionaries Bracket Challenge
March Madness, the single elimination college basketball tournament, is upon us. All month long, the top 68 teams in the US will duke it out in a series of rounds—some of which are remarkable feats in and of themselves, like the Sweet Sixteen, Elite Eight, and Final Four—for the NCAA Division I championship title. Oftentimes [...]
To describe or prescribe, that is the question (with apologies to Shakespeare)
Regular readers of this blog may remember a recent poll in which we posed the following question: Do you think dictionaries should: Describe language as it is being used Prescribe how language should be used Be a mixture of prescriptive and descriptive The results were as follows: 70.27 % were in favour of a mixture, [...]
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![Who's confident [confidant?] about using -ance, -ence, and](http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/wpcms/wp-content/uploads/ant-ent-60x60.jpg "Who's confident [confidant?] about using -ance, -ence, and")
