OED Historical Thesaurus 15-min virtual tour
The Historical Thesaurus of the works as a taxonomic index of language history and, unlike a typical thesaurus, it is not just for looking up synonyms – instead, it can…
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Here’s the whole box and dice on the OED March 2021 update
Well ding-dong, it’s time for OED‘s quarterly update for March 2021, in which nearly 750 existing entries have been subjected to the freshening attentions of our team of researchers, editors,…
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From chingas to chopsing: introducing Bermudian English
Over the past year I’ve had the pleasure of working with the OED as a consultant on a set of new Bermudian English entries. While the addition of this batch…
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The Long Tale of a Shirttail
For such an unassuming word—it’s not even a garment, just a part of one, and the bottom bit, at that—shirttail has undergone a surprising amount of semantic development. This fact…
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The X factor: the challenges of pronouncing X
With the addition of womxn to OED I’ve been considering the productive use of x, and the pronunciation challenges it presents. As a meaningful element, x often suggests an unknown…
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