Tag: lexicography
There are 86 posts.
When is lexical innovation cultural appropriation?
In early April, Pepsi ran a controversial advertisement featuring Kendall Jenner, a woman in a hijab, and vaguely positive protest imagery. The ad was criticized in a number of mainstream venues for using a Kardashian alongside the social issues of the day to sell soda, but some black activists were especially upset with the ad, […]
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William Falconer: poet and lexicographer
I’ve always been intrigued by lexicographers who turned their hand to fiction or poetry. There are plenty of examples, from Dr Johnson to Julian Barnes: how did their experience of the one medium inform the other? Were they flowing novelists with a lexicographer’s facility with words and meaning, all bound within a tight literary structure; […]
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The Word Detective investigates the word ‘detective’
When I retired from the Oxford English Dictionary in 2013 several newspapers picked up on the ‘news’ to inform their public that the OED’s chief word detective was hanging up his boots, calling it a day, or picking up his P45. So it seemed natural enough, when I came to write The Word Detective, that […]
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Esperanto, chocolate, and biplanes in Braille: the interests of Arthur Maling
The Oxford English Dictionary is the work of people: many thousands of them. In my work on the history of the Dictionary I have found the stories of many of those people endlessly fascinating. Very often an individual will enter the story who cries out to be made the subject of a biography in his […]
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Are 52% of words really not included in dictionaries?
In 2011, a remarkable article appeared in the journal Science that argued, based on a computational analysis of five million books, that “52 percent of the English lexicon—the majority of the words used in English books—consists of lexical ‘dark matter’ undocumented in standard references”. Taken at face value, this might seem like an astonishing claim. Fifty-two […]
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OED appeals: can you help us find earlier evidence of ‘Arnold Palmer’?
Can you help us? OED Appeals is a dedicated community space on the OED website where OED editors solicit help in unearthing new information about the history and usage of English. Part of the process of revising words and phrases for the OED involves searching for evidence of a word’s first recorded use in English, […]
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#OneWordMap: mapping the world’s least favourite words
Update: We regret to inform users that due to severe misuse we have had to remove this feature from our website. What if everybody in the world could answer the same question with a single word? It could be almost any question, so long as it could be answered with one word – revealing trends and […]
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An OED editor answers some more of your questions
When we took to Twitter and Facebook to ask you to send us your questions about language and lexicography the last time, we received so many submissions that it wasn’t possible to answer all of them in just one blog post. Therefore, we have included more of your questions below — as well as the most recent ones […]
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