Showing 1-10 of 11 entries tagged
“etymology”
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To make mangoes of melons: Using the evolution of form and senses to understand historical cookbooks
Historical recipes: technical manuals? As a PhD student at the University of Central Florida’s Texts and Technology program, I have primarily been studying historical and modern cookbooks and recipes as…
From the humble chip to the finest flour: an update on etymology
Among the words in this latest quarterly release there are quite a few etymologies of common words with long histories in English. Among those that date back to the earliest…
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…
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…
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