Introduction to Hong Kong English
Hong Kong is a Special Administrative Region of China, and a de facto city state of some 7 million people, located on the coast of Guangdong province in Southern China….
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From the humble chip to the finest flour: an update on etymology
Among the words in this latest quarterly release there are quite a few etymologies of common words with long histories in English. Among those that date back to the earliest…
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A little birdie told us that it’s time for the OED December 2021 update
If there’s a new quarterly update from OED, there must be new entries and new senses to explore. And there are: around 750 of them, and almost as many fully…
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Unmentionables, trousers coughs, and words for the riotously drunk: the December 2021 update to the HTOED
Pants, kecks, rammies, trews, unmentionables… These are just a few of the words in the Historical Thesaurus of the OED (HTOED) category trousers, which usefully complements the newly revised OED…
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On the pronunciation of Omicron
When a word like omicron spikes in use, my first thought as an OED editor is to check that we are giving all the right pronunciations, and to keep a…
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