Switching gears: revising code-switching, n.
A few days ago, I had the following online conversation with a friend who wanted to invite me to speak in a linguistic anthropology class he was teaching: Friend: Hello…
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Code red! It’s the OED September 2020 update
Over the past few months our searching out of new lexical information and breadthening of linguistic knowledge has continued apace. As usual, our new material this quarter comes from newly-revised…
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The Ontario Dialects Project and Canadian English in the OED
This month’s update sees the publication of a number of new words from Canada, the first results of an ongoing collaboration between the OED and the Ontario Dialects Project (ODP),…
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A load of old codswallop? Revising codswallop, n.
In 2005, the Oxford English Dictionary, together with the BBC, launched the Wordhunt Project: an appeal to the public for help in finding earlier evidence for fifty words and phrases…
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July 2020 update: scientific terminology of Covid-19
As we increase our understanding of the virus and its effects and potential treatments, specialist scientific and medical language is increasingly prominent in everyday discourse. The OED decided to publish another update to cover these developments.
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Using corpora to track the language of Covid-19: update 2
In the July 2020 OED update, we take a look at linguistic changes to Covid-19-related vocabulary, and describe the ways that OED lexicographers use corpora to track such changes.
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The OED’s latest exercise in crowdsourcing
Masculinity, meaningless, Munro-baggers, and much, much, more! Find out about the OED’s appeal for help antedating entries in the range M-R.
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From pirates to plant-based: the OED June 2020 update
The June 2020 update to OED arrives in strange times, but if new words and new OED entries are what you’re looking for (and why else would you be here?),…
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That’s the spirit: revising ‘spirit’, n. for OED3
The OED entry for spirit, n. consists of 163 senses, phrases, compounds, and so on, making it one of the larger entries in the dictionary, but by no means the…
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Circuit breakers, PPEs, and Veronica buckets: World Englishes and Covid-19
By analyzing our multibillion-word monitor corpus of English, OED editors can observe how English speakers across the globe are changing the lexicon as a response to the same social pressures resulting from the coronavirus pandemic.
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