Words Where You Are: an update
To mark the start of the Oxford English Dictionary’s 90th birthday celebrations we launched the first of a series of public appeals designed to help us expand and update the…
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Paperback writer
As the publication date approached for the paperback version of my history of the Oxford English Dictionary – now available from all good booksellers! – I found myself, perhaps inevitably…
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Eminem-inspired ‘stan’ added to the Oxford English Dictionary
It’s official: as of June 2018, the Oxford English Dictionary now includes a definition of stan, ‘an overzealous or obsessive fan, esp. of a particular celebrity.’ The dictionary’s entry page…
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Oxford lexicographers of the 1930s: J. L. N. O’Loughlin and Herbert Le Mesurier
As the 1930s began, after many years of being the centre of operations for the compilation of the Oxford English Dictionary, the ‘Dictionary Room’ in the Old Ashmolean, in the…
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Resistance is fertile: the language born of the feminist movement
Ninety years ago today, while Charles Onions and his team were raising a glass to the completion of a project that had been fifty years in the offing, women across…
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