Showing 1-10 of 43 entries
“History of English”
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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Early Women of the OED: 690-1100CE
I recently became interested in researching some of the earliest women cited or mentioned in the OED. Only a few individuals, such as members of royal families or famous scholars…
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The Oxford English Dictionary: focus areas and goals for 2021
In the runup to the 2028 centenary of the completion of OED’s First Edition, the OED team is undertaking a series of projects to update the content more dynamically than…
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A new stream of work on the OED
Revising the etymology and variant forms section in selected entries ahead of full revision Over the past eighteen months we have begun a new initiative as part of the ongoing…
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A load of old codswallop? Revising codswallop, n.
In 2005, the Oxford English Dictionary, together with the BBC, launched the Wordhunt Project: an appeal to the public for help in finding earlier evidence for fifty words and phrases…
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Making use of new resources in LGBT history
The availability of three new online archives made us wonder what new evidence we could uncover by returning to some of the entries which we’ve already revised…
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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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