Showing 1-10 of 55 entries
“The language of...”
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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Old words, new words, EU words: Brexit and the OED
The noun Brexit entered the Oxford English Dictionary in December 2016. It was then still a very recent word by the standards of a historical dictionary, coined in just 2012,…
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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…
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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?
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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…
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