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“The language of...”
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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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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…
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Winnie-the-Pooh in the Oxford English Dictionary
The publication of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary in 1928 coincided with that of The House at Pooh Corner, the sequel to Winnie-the-Pooh which had appeared two…
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Release notes: the formal language of sexuality and gender identity
It is fifty years and more since the social phenomenon known as the sexual revolution began to sweep much of the western world. In the subsequent decades, the words with…
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