Welcome to this December update to the Oxford English Dictionary. After the unprecedented year documented in the Oxford Languages coronavirus updates and Words of the Year, we end 2020 with…
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Revising the etymology and variant forms section in selected entries ahead of full revision Over the past eighteen months we have begun a new initiative as part of the ongoing…
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2020 has been a strange year, all round, and it seems odd to think that back in January I was sitting down in the office to revise the candy range,…
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In most of the places where it is celebrated, this year’s Halloween will be very different to previous years’. One of the activities likely to be hit hardest by Coronavirus…
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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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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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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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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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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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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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