For students and teachers

OED Birthday Words: search for your own personal birthday word and find out if you’re a foodie or if you enjoy your bling. As a fun introduction to advanced searching, with OED birthday words you can learn more about searching details of entries and narrowing by date of entry, and discover the wealth of contextual information that OED gives for words.

Aspects of English: regular features, written by OED editors and specialist authors, exploring words and language—their history, development, and use.

What’s new? Every month, words in the news, topical features, and interactive graphics.

Oxford University Press: Free Dictionary resources for children
Download a variety of free activities and worksheets (PDF) to be used alongside the OED, or Oxford children’s dictionaries.

Using the OED in university

• ‘Gender and genre: students, researchers, and the OED‘, is a blog piece by Professor Susan Watkins discussing using the OED in university research and assignments.
•  See also: Tara Williams, “The OED in the Literature Classroom,” Pedagogy 18.3 (2018): 547-550.

Teachit: resources using the OED

Teachit English is a resource website for teachers, with over 23,465 pages of classroom worksheets, PowerPoint presentations and activities, written by and edited by professional secondary English teachers. Free members to the site can access thousands of PDFs, while subscribers can adapt the resources and download 25 teaching packs. Teachit English is part of AQA Education.

Key Stage 5 (Free PDF)

• Gender and Language Change
• An Introduction to Language Change
• Exploring New OED Entries
• Exploring Neologisms

Lesson plans: exercises for students by stage:

• Key stage 3, 11-14 (US grade 6-8)
• Key stage 4, 14-16 (US grade 9-10 )
• AS and A-level, 16-18 (US grade 11-12)

Quizzes: test your skills and expand your knowledge

Learning links: online language resources

Balderdash & Piffle: broadcast in 2007, this major BBC series looked at words and their stories, and appealed to viewers to help update the OED.

The Guardian- Inside the OED: this podcast (with text version) explains the processes involved with adding new words to the OED, and the impact modern technology has on the dictionary today.

The OED story

A long and rich history: as the last word on words for over a century, the OED‘s is a fascinating story of language and change.

Messrs Murray and Minor: learn the stories of the OED‘s first editor, Sir James Murray (1837–1915), and one of its most famous and unusual contributors, Dr William Minor (1834–1920), from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.