Showing 1-10 of 36 entries
“Varieties of English”
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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Release notes: West African English pronunciations
The OED‘s latest update sees the addition of several Nigerian English words, including bukateria, danfo, and tokunbo . This was the perfect opportunity for OED’s pronunciation team to add a West…
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Release notes: Nigerian English
My English-speaking is rooted in a Nigerian experience and not in a British or American or Australian one. I have taken ownership of English. This is how acclaimed Nigerian writer…
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It’s time to kvell about some awesomesauce new words: the OED January 2020 update
The January 2020 update to the Oxford English Dictionary is now online, and OED lexicographers having rubbed their minds together are ready to share the latest contributions to their work…
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When regional Englishes got their words
David-Antoine Williams takes a bird’s-eye-view of Caribbean English, as documented in the OED, as a way of highlighting some of the lexicological and lexicographical issues at stake.
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Still dung wet? Discovering an unexpected lexical survival on Twitter
Revising ‘dung’ revealed a puzzling case of possible lexical resurrection, but is it a case of continued currency, for which the evidence is missing, or a case of independent re-formation?
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Dope and sex and rock ‘n’ roll: slang lexicography with Jonathon Green (part one)
‘My feeling is that I don’t subscribe to a specific definition, rather the sense that slang has a pervasive state of mind. I would suggest that there is an underlying strain that goes through the entire slang lexis, which is sedition.’
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Fantoosh sitooteries and more: new Scottish entries in the March 2019 update
Submissions to 2017’s Free the Word appeal continue to be a great source of regional words and senses for the OED. The March release includes a number of newly-added Scottish…
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Meet the Editors: Catherine Sangster
Meet Catherine Sangster, our Head of Pronunciations, whose job it is to ‘look after the bits of the dictionary that tell you how to pronounce the word you’re looking up’….
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South African additions to the OED
South Africa is known as the Rainbow Nation, a name that celebrates the modern country’s acceptance of and pride in its multi-ethnic and multicultural identity. This diversity of cultures, traditions,…
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