In the first part of this blog post, we discussed an antedating for tea found in the Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEEC). That instance, in a 1643 letter by…
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Who creates and adopts new vocabulary in the history of English? A team of University of Helsinki researchers discuss new antedatings for both ‘cha’ and ‘tea’ from the time of the English Civil War:
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This month’s update marked a small but colourful milestone in Oxford lexicographers’ use of social media as a source for illustrative quotations.
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Genuinely ‘new’ words, unique character strings created by a particular individual for a specific purpose, don’t usually pass into common usage, or get into dictionaries. Those that do make it…
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In my first year of secondary school, my classmates and I were delighted to find that one of the drawers in the school’s workshop was labelled ‘bastard files’. As far…
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How could you use the OED dataset in your research? Take part in the next phase of the OED’s evolution as we reimagine how we can share our data to better support academic research.
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Revising ‘dung’ revealed a puzzling case of possible lexical resurrection, but is it a case of continued currency, for which the evidence is missing, or a case of independent re-formation?
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The noun Brexit entered the Oxford English Dictionary in December 2016. It was then still a very recent word by the standards of a historical dictionary, coined in just 2012,…
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In the twenty-first century, at the dawn of the Anthropocene (2000) era, the human race began to abandon analogue socializing for the seductive delights of the digital ether. The twitterati’s…
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With the ink freshly dried on the final pages of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, an extraordinary mission begun over 60 years prior to compile a comprehensive…
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