Showing 1-10 of 13 entries
“History of English”
- 1
- 2
Words from the 1950s
Guest blogger John Ayto on the language of the 1950s – the decade the culture of youth came of age:
Find out more
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…
Find out more
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…
Find out more
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…
Find out more
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…
Find out more
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…
Find out more
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…
Find out more
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…
Find out more
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…
Find out more
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…
Find out more- 1
- 2
