Showing 11-20 of 24 entries
“History of English”
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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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…
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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…
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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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