Showing 1-10 of 19 entries
“The language of...”
- 1
- 2
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…
Find out more
Words from the 1970s
The decade that time forgot? Can any of the new vocabulary of the 1970s help to pinpoint the sources of disenchantment?
Find out more
Words from the 1960s
If youth had flexed its muscles in the 1950s, in the 1960s it ruled the roost. Out on the streets, in the clubs and on the campuses, it was young…
Find out more
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
100 words that define the First World War
Discover the ways in which the events of the First World War left their mark on the English language with our interactive timeline.
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
Paperback writer
As the publication date approached for the paperback version of my history of the Oxford English Dictionary – now available from all good booksellers! – I found myself, perhaps inevitably…
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- 1
- 2
