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.
Find out more
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.
Find out more
Masculinity, meaningless, Munro-baggers, and much, much, more! Find out about the OED’s appeal for help antedating entries in the range M-R.
Find out more
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?),…
Find out more
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…
Find out more
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.
Find out more
OED editors are continually monitoring linguistic developments, and one way of doing this is through analysis of language corpora. Here, we summarize some recent trends, using data from our monitor corpus of English.
Find out more
Dr Seth Mehl, Digital Humanities Fellow at the University of Sheffield, on how exploring a very specific kind of lexical co-occurrence delivers fascinating new insights into large text collections.
Find out more
It is a rare experience for lexicographers to observe an exponential rise in usage of a single word in a very short period of time, and for that word to…
Find out more
In the March 2020 update to the OED, our entry for bear, n.1 found itself in the paws of our revision editors. The process of taking the ‘bear’ that appeared…
Find out more
