Showing 1-10 of 128 entries
“Quarterly updates”
Here’s the whole box and dice on the OED March 2021 update
Well ding-dong, it’s time for OED‘s quarterly update for March 2021, in which nearly 750 existing entries have been subjected to the freshening attentions of our team of researchers, editors,…
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From chingas to chopsing: introducing Bermudian English
Over the past year I’ve had the pleasure of working with the OED as a consultant on a set of new Bermudian English entries. While the addition of this batch…
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The Long Tale of a Shirttail
For such an unassuming word—it’s not even a garment, just a part of one, and the bottom bit, at that—shirttail has undergone a surprising amount of semantic development. This fact…
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The X factor: the challenges of pronouncing X
With the addition of womxn to OED I’ve been considering the productive use of x, and the pronunciation challenges it presents. As a meaningful element, x often suggests an unknown…
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Stop the clock for the OED December 2020 update
Welcome to this December update to the Oxford English Dictionary. After the unprecedented year documented in the Oxford Languages coronavirus updates and Words of the Year, we end 2020 with…
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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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Who can revise ‘candy’? The lexicographer can…
2020 has been a strange year, all round, and it seems odd to think that back in January I was sitting down in the office to revise the candy range,…
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Switching gears: revising code-switching, n.
A few days ago, I had the following online conversation with a friend who wanted to invite me to speak in a linguistic anthropology class he was teaching: Friend: Hello…
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Code red! It’s the OED September 2020 update
Over the past few months our searching out of new lexical information and breadthening of linguistic knowledge has continued apace. As usual, our new material this quarter comes from newly-revised…
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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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