Oxford Languages Summer Placement 2021
The Oxford Languages Department (OL) at Oxford University Press is pleased to announce that it will be running a virtual paid summer placement for 2021, which will run for five…
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Women of Words: a journey through the archives of the OED
The OED often appears in popular culture and in the media – its ambition, span, and attention to detail has captured many imaginations over the last 150 years. The latest…
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OED Historical Thesaurus 15-min virtual tour
The Historical Thesaurus of the works as a taxonomic index of language history and, unlike a typical thesaurus, it is not just for looking up synonyms – instead, it can…
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Here’s the whole box and dice on the OED March 2021 update
Well ding-dong, it’s time for OED‘s quarterly update for March 2021, in which nearly 750 existing entries have been subjected to the freshening attentions of our team of researchers, editors,…
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From chingas to chopsing: introducing Bermudian English
Over the past year I’ve had the pleasure of working with the OED as a consultant on a set of new Bermudian English entries. While the addition of this batch…
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The Long Tale of a Shirttail
For such an unassuming word—it’s not even a garment, just a part of one, and the bottom bit, at that—shirttail has undergone a surprising amount of semantic development. This fact…
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The X factor: the challenges of pronouncing X
With the addition of womxn to OED I’ve been considering the productive use of x, and the pronunciation challenges it presents. As a meaningful element, x often suggests an unknown…
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Major health crises and the OED: language evolution and challenges in health communication
Covid-19 and language During the coronavirus pandemic, the world’s languages have had to adapt to a sudden influx of neologisms and scientific terminology as scientists and policymakers strive to convey…
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OED antedating update: looking back at M-R
Back in May 2020, OED launched its latest in a long line of crowdsourcing initiatives, asking members of the public to seek out earlier evidence for entries in the alphabetical…
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Early Women of the OED: 690-1100CE
I recently became interested in researching some of the earliest women cited or mentioned in the OED. Only a few individuals, such as members of royal families or famous scholars…
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