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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It was the decade of all things cyber-: cybercrime, cybersex, cybershoppers, cyberwar. The main fear in the cybercafé was the dreaded millennium bug, which threatened to make the world’s computer systems crash when the clocks chimed midnight on 31 December 1999.
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The Oxford English Dictionary is not the only one with a 90th birthday to celebrate this past year – Desmond Morris, the renowned zoologist and author of The Naked Ape,…
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The Oxford English Dictionary is not the only one with a 90th birthday to celebrate this past year – Desmond Morris, the renowned zoologist and author of The Naked Ape,…
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The habits of post-war austerity had begun to chafe in the 1960s. The economic shocks of the 1970s did little to permit the loosening of shackles, but in the 1980s…
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In revising one entry for a recent update, one of our editors decided to put Twitter to a different lexicographical use
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In ‘the art of reading for the OED’, John Birchall explains what makes a good reader and how seventeenth-century prose introduced him to new perspectives.
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