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“History of English”
Cha before tea: finding earlier mentions in a corpus of early English letters (part 2)
In the first part of this blog post, we discussed an antedating for tea found in the Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEEC). That instance, in a 1643 letter by…
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Cha before tea: finding earlier mentions in a corpus of early English letters (part 1)
Who creates and adopts new vocabulary in the history of English? A team of University of Helsinki researchers discuss new antedatings for both ‘cha’ and ‘tea’ from the time of the English Civil War:
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Still dung wet? Discovering an unexpected lexical survival on Twitter
Revising ‘dung’ revealed a puzzling case of possible lexical resurrection, but is it a case of continued currency, for which the evidence is missing, or a case of independent re-formation?
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Words from the 21st century
In the twenty-first century, at the dawn of the Anthropocene (2000) era, the human race began to abandon analogue socializing for the seductive delights of the digital ether. The twitterati’s…
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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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