Showing 1-10 of 59 entries
“The language of...”
Tracking the history of the future through words
A historical lexicographer’s perspective on reviewing the OED’s coverage of vocabulary relating to climate change and sustainability. In 2021, the OED embarked on a project to broaden and review its…
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The language of climate change and environmental sustainability: the OED October 2021 update
Over the course of the last 30 years or so, the OED’s editors have researched and recorded many of the best-known terms related to climate change, such as global warming,…
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An introduction to words of Korean origin
The OED includes dozens of words originating in the Korean language and/or related to Korea. Although the oldest of these words are attested in English as early as the 17th…
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Daebak! The OED gets a K-update
K-pop, K-drama, K-beauty, K-food, K-style—these days, everything seems to be getting prefixed with a K- as South Korea’s popular culture continues to rise in international popularity. South Korean director Bong…
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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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Major health crises and the OED: language evolution and challenges in health communication
Covid-19 and language During the coronavirus pandemic, the world’s languages have had to adapt to a sudden influx of neologisms and scientific terminology as scientists and policymakers strive to convey…
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July 2020 update: scientific terminology of Covid-19
As we increase our understanding of the virus and its effects and potential treatments, specialist scientific and medical language is increasingly prominent in everyday discourse. The OED decided to publish another update to cover these developments.
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Using corpora to track the language of Covid-19: update 2
In the July 2020 OED update, we take a look at linguistic changes to Covid-19-related vocabulary, and describe the ways that OED lexicographers use corpora to track such changes.
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Circuit breakers, PPEs, and Veronica buckets: World Englishes and Covid-19
By analyzing our multibillion-word monitor corpus of English, OED editors can observe how English speakers across the globe are changing the lexicon as a response to the same social pressures resulting from the coronavirus pandemic.
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Corpus analysis of the language of Covid-19
OED editors are continually monitoring linguistic developments, and one way of doing this is through analysis of language corpora. Here, we summarize some recent trends, using data from our monitor corpus of English.
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