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“History of English”
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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A brief history of singular ‘they’
Singular they has become the pronoun of choice to replace he and she in cases where the gender of the antecedent – the word the pronoun refers to – is…
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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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Americanisms (and ‘America Firsters’) in the OED
When the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary were putting the finishing touches on the first edition ninety years ago, they knew their work was in no way ‘complete’. The…
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Another find from Shakespeare’s World – a startling antedating for partner meaning ‘spouse’
One of the most distinctive modern uses of partner is to denote the ‘significant other’ in one’s life. OED3 defines this sense (5a) as: A person who is linked by…
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1928: the Year of the Dictionary
‘This year, whatever else it may be, is the Year of the Dictionary.’ So wrote Charles Onions in the Times of 19 April 1928, in an article celebrating the completion…
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Words as old as the OED
When the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary was finally completed in 1928, the world of 1857, when work on the dictionary began, must have seemed impossibly distant. Radio,…
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