Showing 1-10 of 22 entries
“The language of...”
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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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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