Introduction to Philippine English
The Philippines is home to over 100 million people spread across 7,107 islands in Southeast Asia. Among the more than 100 mostly Austronesian languages spoken in this densely populated archipelago…
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Introduction to Malaysian English
The use of English in present day Malaysia traces its beginnings back to the British presence in the Straits Settlements of Penang, Singapore, and Melaka from the 18th century. English was…
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Introduction to Irish English
Ireland is an island in northwest Europe, west of England, which consists politically of the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, the latter of which has been a constituent part…
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Introduction to Indian English
In less than 200 years since its formal introduction as part of a nascent and westernized education system, English has grown to be the medium through which the people of…
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Introduction to New Zealand English
The original inhabitants of New Zealand were the Maori who arrived by canoe over 1,000 years ago from the Eastern Pacific. In 1840, representatives of the British government and Maori…
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Introduction to Hong Kong English
Hong Kong is a Special Administrative Region of China, and a de facto city state of some 7 million people, located on the coast of Guangdong province in Southern China….
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From the humble chip to the finest flour: an update on etymology
Among the words in this latest quarterly release there are quite a few etymologies of common words with long histories in English. Among those that date back to the earliest…
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A little birdie told us that it’s time for the OED December 2021 update
If there’s a new quarterly update from OED, there must be new entries and new senses to explore. And there are: around 750 of them, and almost as many fully…
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Unmentionables, trousers coughs, and words for the riotously drunk: the December 2021 update to the HTOED
Pants, kecks, rammies, trews, unmentionables… These are just a few of the words in the Historical Thesaurus of the OED (HTOED) category trousers, which usefully complements the newly revised OED…
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On the pronunciation of Omicron
When a word like omicron spikes in use, my first thought as an OED editor is to check that we are giving all the right pronunciations, and to keep a…
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