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“The language of...”
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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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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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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.
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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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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…
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