The Oxford English Dictionary: focus areas and goals for 2021
In the runup to the 2028 centenary of the completion of OED’s First Edition, the OED team is undertaking a series of projects to update the content more dynamically than…
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Roger Kreuz on irony and the OED
What do the words perpetrate, picnic, and precious have in common? How about the phrases clutch one’s pearls, fun and games, and little ray of sunshine? It turns out that…
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Stop the clock for the OED December 2020 update
Welcome to this December update to the Oxford English Dictionary. After the unprecedented year documented in the Oxford Languages coronavirus updates and Words of the Year, we end 2020 with…
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A new stream of work on the OED
Revising the etymology and variant forms section in selected entries ahead of full revision Over the past eighteen months we have begun a new initiative as part of the ongoing…
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Who can revise ‘candy’? The lexicographer can…
2020 has been a strange year, all round, and it seems odd to think that back in January I was sitting down in the office to revise the candy range,…
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Trick or treat? Some Halloween revisions to OED
In most of the places where it is celebrated, this year’s Halloween will be very different to previous years’. One of the activities likely to be hit hardest by Coronavirus…
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Switching gears: revising code-switching, n.
A few days ago, I had the following online conversation with a friend who wanted to invite me to speak in a linguistic anthropology class he was teaching: Friend: Hello…
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Code red! It’s the OED September 2020 update
Over the past few months our searching out of new lexical information and breadthening of linguistic knowledge has continued apace. As usual, our new material this quarter comes from newly-revised…
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The Ontario Dialects Project and Canadian English in the OED
This month’s update sees the publication of a number of new words from Canada, the first results of an ongoing collaboration between the OED and the Ontario Dialects Project (ODP),…
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A load of old codswallop? Revising codswallop, n.
In 2005, the Oxford English Dictionary, together with the BBC, launched the Wordhunt Project: an appeal to the public for help in finding earlier evidence for fifty words and phrases…
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