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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Stand up for bastards! Notes on ‘bastard’ in the June 2019 update
In my first year of secondary school, my classmates and I were delighted to find that one of the drawers in the school’s workshop was labelled ‘bastard files’. As far…
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The OED: supporting research through innovation
How could you use the OED dataset in your research? Take part in the next phase of the OED’s evolution as we reimagine how we can share our data to better support academic research.
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Still dung wet? Discovering an unexpected lexical survival on Twitter
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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Old words, new words, EU words: Brexit and the OED
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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Words from the 21st century
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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A look back on our 90th anniversary celebrations
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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Words from the 1990s
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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In conversation with Desmond Morris – part one
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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