Renewing Our Commitment to the OED
Over the last year, the Oxford Languages group, which is made up of the OED team alongside our other dictionary projects and teams, has been reviewing its organizational structure and…
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Release notes: West African English pronunciations
The OED‘s latest update sees the addition of several Nigerian English words, including bukateria, danfo, and tokunbo . This was the perfect opportunity for OED’s pronunciation team to add a West…
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Release notes: Nigerian English
My English-speaking is rooted in a Nigerian experience and not in a British or American or Australian one. I have taken ownership of English. This is how acclaimed Nigerian writer…
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It’s time to kvell about some awesomesauce new words: the OED January 2020 update
The January 2020 update to the Oxford English Dictionary is now online, and OED lexicographers having rubbed their minds together are ready to share the latest contributions to their work…
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When regional Englishes got their words
David-Antoine Williams takes a bird’s-eye-view of Caribbean English, as documented in the OED, as a way of highlighting some of the lexicological and lexicographical issues at stake.
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These ARE the words you are looking for: the OED October 2019 update
From ‘fake news’ to ‘Jedi mind trick’, let us ‘loop you in’ with the latest OED update:
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Cha before tea: finding earlier mentions in a corpus of early English letters (part 2)
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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Cha before tea: finding earlier mentions in a corpus of early English letters (part 1)
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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No tears of joy (yet): emoji make their OED debut
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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Gym bunnies and junkyard dogs: new words in the June 2019 update
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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