Showing 1-10 of 18 entries
“History of English”
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Words from the 1990s
It was the decade of all things cyber-: cybercrime, cybersex, cybershoppers, cyberwar. The main fear in the cybercafé was the dreaded millennium bug, which threatened to make the world’s computer systems crash when the clocks chimed midnight on 31 December 1999.
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Words from the 1980s
The habits of post-war austerity had begun to chafe in the 1960s. The economic shocks of the 1970s did little to permit the loosening of shackles, but in the 1980s…
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Dope and sex and rock ‘n’ roll: slang lexicography with Jonathon Green (part two)
In celebration of the 90th anniversary of the OED’s completed First Edition, slang specialist and lexicographer Jonathon Green sat down with Henry Hitchings, a Consultant Editor for the OED, to…
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Dope and sex and rock ‘n’ roll: slang lexicography with Jonathon Green (part one)
‘My feeling is that I don’t subscribe to a specific definition, rather the sense that slang has a pervasive state of mind. I would suggest that there is an underlying strain that goes through the entire slang lexis, which is sedition.’
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An antedating for gay, and other treasures from the Burgess Papers
OED Associate Editor, Peter Gilliver, discusses some of the recent research involved in updating the entry for ‘gay’.
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Words from the 1950s
Guest blogger John Ayto on the language of the 1950s – the decade the culture of youth came of age:
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Words from the 1940s
It was a decade of war and peace: the first half monopolized by worldwide conflict, the second tentatively reaching out towards ways of avoiding a repetition of the first. Together…
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Words from the 1930s
The history of cool as a general term of approval is a patchy affair. It emerged in African American English by the early 1930s, perhaps as a development of an…
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Words from the 1920s
In the decade following the war to end war (a coinage first recorded in 1914) there was frivolity in the air, but also a residue of tension, of anxiety, that…
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From ‘abaca’ to ‘kilig’: World English and the OED
In its March 2016 update, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) published an entry for the Philippine English word kilig, an addition that attracted considerable media attention that eventually led to…
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