Showing 1-8 of 8 entries tagged
“etymology”
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…
‘Kaffir’
On looking at the OED’s revised entry for Kaffir, originally a noun but later also developing adjectival uses, perhaps the most striking aspect of the picture that emerges is the…
Release notes: Making sense of sense
Sense was published in the 1912 fascicle of the first edition of the OED (OED1). That means that it’s over a hundred years since an editor first grappled with the…
Release notes: the Long Knife
If you meet someone carrying a long knife, you take notice. Drastic and possibly unprovoked violence enters your mind. The native North Americans noticed that the white settlers of Virginia…
Release notes: etymology summaries
From December 2015 onwards, we have begun adding some new material at the beginning of the etymology section for each OED entry. This comprises a short statement of the etymological…
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…
Release notes: how the French ‘toile’ cloth came to be toilet
It’s a fascinating fact of linguistic history that some words hardly change their main meaning or develop new meanings, while other words swing Tarzan-like from one semantic treetop to another…
Release notes: twists in the tale of fairy and the history of beauty
The image above shows some of the most significant words newly updated in OED Online (sized in proportion to the number of senses or phrases in each). Our selections are…
