The OED in two minutes
Modern English includes words from a wide variety of different sources around the world. Patterns of word-borrowing over time reflect the changing demography of its speakers; cultural and economic influences…
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Release notes: an unravelled mystery
English has two prefixes spelt un-. UN-1 means ‘not’, ‘the opposite of’, and is most typically used with descriptive adjectives, such as unhappy, while UN-2 means ‘the reverse of’, ‘de-‘,…
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Release notes: words in ‘un’ – patterns and surprises
Revising words beginning with un– has brought up one particular issue many times: sometimes the evidence that we have for the “negative” word beginning with un– is earlier than the…
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New words notes December 2014
G’day. It seems like the right moment to issue this greeting before moving on to general and selected individual introductions to this latest batch of new words, as this archetypal…
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