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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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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