Showing 1-10 of 52 entries
“History of English”
To make mangoes of melons: Using the evolution of form and senses to understand historical cookbooks
Historical recipes: technical manuals? As a PhD student at the University of Central Florida’s Texts and Technology program, I have primarily been studying historical and modern cookbooks and recipes as…
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Introduction to Nigerian English
Nigeria, a country in West Africa, is the most populous Black country in the world, with an estimated population of nearly 220 million people. A former British colony until 1960,…
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OED100: Revising Function Words in the OED
Function words are the words that enable language to operate, rather like the gears in a machine. Typically they don’t have a referential meaning of their own but connect together…
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Flattery and incongruous mixtures in the Historical Thesaurus of the OED
One of the words added to the OED this update is plámás, used in Irish English to mean ‘flattery; insincere or exaggerated praise, esp. when used to cajole or persuade’…
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OED March revision update: just what the doctor ordered
This quarter’s OED update includes a revised entry for doctor. The word today immediately brings to mind white coats and stethoscopes, but the early history of the word had more…
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Searching the OED
You may have spotted our how to search the OED guide recently. To supplement this, we’d like to highlight some of the interesting things you can find in the OED…
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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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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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Malignant monsters and the limbo in the HTOED
Please note that a subscription to the OED is required to access the Historical Thesaurus . Learn about subscription options, or, if your library or institution offers access to the…
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Put in a good word: using the Historical Thesaurus of the OED
The Historical Thesaurus of the OED (HTOED) is a fascinating resource for exploring the ways that concepts have been expressed in different periods, and for discovering which synonyms were available…
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