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To celebrate the OED’s 90th birthday, we are pleased to offer annual OED subscriptions at a reduced rate of £90 for the duration of the birthday year.
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Release notes: adore the fedora
What links an item of men’s headwear and a glamorous fin-de-siècle French actress? Most sources agree that the fedora, the familiar soft felt hat with a curled brim and a creased…
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Release notes: capturing the interweb of words
‘Have you heard of this new inter-web thingy?’ one character sarcastically asks of another in a quotation recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary’s new entry for Interweb.The humorous power of…
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New words notes June 2015
The online Oxford English Dictionary (oed.com) launched on 14 March 2000, and since the OED generally does not add neologisms until they have had some time to establish themselves, the…
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Release notes: have, look, large, late
The history of many words consists of a straightforward series of meanings, in which each meaning represents a greater or smaller modification of the one before. In other words, there…
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New words notes March 2015
It’s that time again, when we bring you the very latest in additions to the Oxford English Dictionary, and, as usual, we have lexicographical facts and figures coming out of…
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The OED in two minutes
Modern English includes words from a wide variety of different sources around the world. Patterns of word-borrowing over time reflect the changing demography of its speakers; cultural and economic influences…
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Release notes: an unravelled mystery
English has two prefixes spelt un-. UN-1 means ‘not’, ‘the opposite of’, and is most typically used with descriptive adjectives, such as unhappy, while UN-2 means ‘the reverse of’, ‘de-‘,…
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Release notes: words in ‘un’ – patterns and surprises
Revising words beginning with un– has brought up one particular issue many times: sometimes the evidence that we have for the “negative” word beginning with un– is earlier than the…
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New words notes December 2014
G’day. It seems like the right moment to issue this greeting before moving on to general and selected individual introductions to this latest batch of new words, as this archetypal…
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