Webinars and events
Information about any upcoming events and webinars will be posted on this page. Recordings from past events are also published here.
We are always looking for new ideas and potential speakers for future webinars, so please share your thoughts with us.
You can explore more ways to use the OED through our teaching resources page.
Upcoming webinars
There are no upcoming events for the moment.
Our most recent events
The Oxford Dictionary of African American English: First 100 words
The Oxford Dictionary of African American English (ODAAE), a joint project of Oxford Languages (Oxford University Press) and Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, is now well underway, and the first 100 entries have recently been completed. The project is spearheaded by Prof Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Editor-in-Chief, Director of the Center, and Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard.
Watch a presentation of the project’s progress, followed by a Q&A session.
Agenda:
• Where we are one year into the project
• How did we get here? The roles people played in uncovering and recording words
• Some examples of the entries already finished
• Q&A
This project is funded in part by grants from the Mellon (https://mellon.org/) and Wagner Foundations (www.wfound.org). Read more about it here.
Bermudian English in the Oxford English Dictionary
In this talk, the panellists commented on the uniqueness of Bermudian English, and the fact that many word evidence sources are found in dialect parody. They also explained how academic research can be used to inform OED updates, using this as an example.
The talk covered:
• The Bermudian English variety and its description (watch from 00:00 – 12:48)
• Using academic research in OED updates (watch from 12:48 – 24:43)
• The Bermudian English pronunciation model (watch from 24:43 – 38:44)
• Dialect parody – why it happens, and the caveats of using it as lexicographic evidence (watch from 38:44 until the end)
The questions that were submitted during the event were addressed by the presenters and can be accessed here: Q&A: Bermudian English in the Oxford English Dictionary
Read more about Bermudian English in the OED here.
The Oxford Dictionary of African American English in the making: panel discussion
Oxford Languages and the Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African & African American Research have partnered for a three-year research project, whose aim is to compile the Oxford Dictionary of African American English (ODAAE).
The panel discussion covered:
• Project overview and aims
• Where we are now
• Why we are compiling ODAAE
• The socio-linguistic importance of African American English
• Q&A
Watch the recording:
Semantic transfer and the OED: investigating metonymization
Lauren Simon, holder of an MSt in Linguistics, Philology, and Phonetics, describes the methodology and labelling process used in her investigation of semantic change through metonymization, and discusses some of her findings.
Who is this for?
- Researchers investigating semantic change
- Linguists interested in how and why new senses develop
What did this session cover?
- The unique contours and quirks of OED raw data and how to handle data cleaning
- The sample selection and data tagging processes: how does one determine which tags to use and how to apply them, particularly in borderline cases?
- Conclusions and interesting directions for future research – potentially interesting new research questions that can be tackled with working knowledge of how to use OED data as a rich resource.
Oxford World English Symposium 2022
The sessions from the Oxford World English Symposium 2022 are now available for viewing:
Language prejudice and the documentation of minoritized varieties of English
Many still consider some varieties of English to be inferior to others. Such language prejudice has a clear social and economic impact on certain language communities, whose members are frequently marginalized because of their accents or their choice of words.
Many still consider some varieties of English to be inferior to others. Such language prejudice has a clear social and economic impact on certain language communities, whose members are frequently marginalized because of their accents or their choice of words.
To mark the launch of the OED’s Varieties of English page, Dr Danica Salazar, World English Editor, and Dr Catherine Sangster, OED Executive Editor, were joined by a panel of guest speakers to discuss:
- Attitudes towards language variation
- Why are particular varieties valued over others?
- How does the perception of a language variety impact communication?
- Why is it important to document minoritized varieties of English?
- Code switching
- Dialect parody
Our guest panel was composed by:
- Dr Jeannette Allsopp, retired Senior Research Fellow in Lexicography and founder and former Director of the Richard and Jeannette Allsopp Centre for Caribbean Lexicography at the University of the West Indies
- Dr Rosemary Hall, Research Assistant, The Dialect and Heritage Project, University of Leeds
- Dr Kingsley Ugwuanyi, English Lecturer and Researcher, University of Nigeria
- Kelly Elizabeth Wright, PhD Candidate in Experimental Sociolinguistics, University of Michigan
The questions which could not be addressed during the webinar session were addressed by the panelists and their answers are available to view here.
OED resources to support teaching and academic research in Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan
The OED is a powerful online linguistic resource, providing features, tools, and language data which are essential for academic research and teaching. However, the extent of the OED capabilities is not always explored to its full potential.
The Oxford University Press team – Dr Danica Salazar, World English Editor, and Ms Chen Zhou, Regional Customer Trainer, presented a session where they provided an overview of all the OED can offer.
Guest speaker Dr Lisa Lim, Associate Professor at Curtin University and ‘Language Matters’ columnist for the South China Morning Post, presented her perspective of how the OED can be used in academic and other professional research, within the realms of language contact and evolution within multicultural environments.
Watch the recording of this presentation here:
The Oxford English Dictionary for Chinese users: resources to support teaching and academic research
The OED is a powerful online linguistic resource, providing features, tools, and language data which are essential for academic research and teaching. However, the extent of the OED capabilities is not always explored to its full potential.
The Oxford University Press team – Dr Danica Salazar, World English Editor, and Ms Chen Zhou, Regional Customer Trainer, presented a session where they provided an overview of all the OED can offer.
Guest speaker Dr Zhong Ai, Lecturer in English at Shanghai Maritime University, presented her perspectives of how the OED can be used in academic research, with a particular focus on the language contact between English and Chinese, and Chinese loanwords in English.
Watch the recording of this presentation here:
The questions that we were not able to address during the live presentation were passed on to the panellists and their answers, as well as the presentation slides are available to view here.
Previous webinars
Language updates
Word of the Year and other words of interest
- Words of an unprecedented year: Behind the scenes of the Oxford Languages’ Word of the Year 2020
- ‘Bitch’, ‘bint’, and ‘maid’: exploring sexist language in the dictionary
OED updates
About the OED
How to use the OED
- OED resources to support teaching and academic research in Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan
- The Oxford English Dictionary for Chinese users: resources to support teaching and academic research
- OED Historical Thesaurus 15-min virtual tour
- The Oxford English Dictionary for Japanese users: resources to support teaching and academic research
- The Oxford English Dictionary for Korean users: resources to support teaching and academic research
- Making the Most of the Oxford English Dictionary (US)
- Making the Most of the Oxford English Dictionary (UK)
- The Oxford English Dictionary Text Annotator prototype tool
- OED Labs: exploring the Oxford English Dictionary’s prototype tools
- What’s in a pronunciation? British and U.S. transcription models in the OED
- OED resources to support teaching and academic research in Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan
- The Oxford English Dictionary for Chinese users: resources to support teaching and academic research
- The Oxford English Dictionary for Japanese users: resources to support teaching and academic research
- The Oxford English Dictionary for Korean users: resources to support teaching and academic research
- Major health crises and the OED: language evolution and challenges in health communication
- Applying a semantic tool to the OED: the Linguistic DNA Project
- Using the OED to investigate the implications of Douglas’s lexical choices in the Eneados
- The OED and historical text collections: discovering new words
- The Oxford English Dictionary Text Annotator prototype tool
- OED Labs: exploring the Oxford English Dictionary’s prototype tools
- The Cross-Dictionary Sense Linking Platform at Oxford Languages
- Oxford Languages and Prêt-à-Llod’s Cross-Dictionary Annotation Tool
- Major health crises and the OED: language evolution and challenges in health communication
- Mama put in the OED: World Englishes and the Oxford English Dictionary
- New terms in current use in different parts of the world, and what social realities these words reveal
- Lessons learnt from other global health crises, and how can we use these to ensure more effective health communication?
- What considerations need to be made in crafting accurate and locally appropriate translations of Covid-19 terminology from English?
- New terms in current use in different parts of the world, and what social realities these words reveal
- Lessons learnt from other global health crises, and how can we use these to ensure more effective health communication?
- What considerations need to be made in crafting accurate and locally appropriate translations of Covid-19 terminology from English?
Processes and methodology
History
OED and Research
General
OED Labs and other data tools
World English
We are always looking for new ideas and potential speakers for future webinars, so please share your thoughts below.
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Language updates
Word of the Year and other words of interest
Words of an unprecedented year: Behind the scenes of the Oxford Languages’ Word of the Year 2020
The English language, like all of us, has had to adapt rapidly and repeatedly this year. Given the phenomenal breadth of language change and development during 2020, Oxford Languages concluded that this is a year which cannot be neatly accommodated in one single word.
Join Casper Grathwohl – Oxford Languages President, Fiona McPherson – OED Editor, Kate Wild – Executive Editor, Strategic Lexical Projects, and Katherine Martin – Head of Product for Oxford Languages, for a live interactive online session. They will describe the corpus-analysis process of selecting the Word of the Year, and this year’s particular challenges of keeping track of language developments, discuss the language themes of 2020, and share what makes a good Word of the Year.Watch the recording
‘Bitch’, ‘bint’, and ‘maid’: exploring sexist language in the dictionary
To mark this year’s International Women’s Day, the Oxford Languages team, alongside special guests, held an online panel discussion to explore how and why sexist terms are recorded in the dictionary and what this language reveals about the world around us.
Drawing on real evidence of language use, the panel discuss why the dictionary captures terms such as ‘bitch’ and ‘bint’; what these most challenging definitions tell us; and the trends we are witnessing right now around women and language.
Watch the recording of this presentation here: https://www.youtube.com/embed/hFG0FqBkQXM
Following our International Women’s Day panel discussion on sexist language in the dictionary, we continued the conversation with Eleanor Maier, OED Executive Editor, and Professor Helen Taylor, Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Exeter. Listen here
OED updates
The language of Covid-19: a special OED update
Great social change tends to bring great linguistic change, and this has never been truer than in the Covid-19 crisis. We have seen new coinages; the adaptation of existing terms to talk about the pandemic and its social and economic impacts; and the widespread use of terms previously restricted to fields such as epidemiology and medicine. In order to take account of these developments, the OED has been updated outside of our regular quarterly releases.
OED editors Fiona McPherson, Trish Stewart, and Kate Wild have presented the rationale behind these special updates, the processes involved, and the resources used.
Watch the recording of this presentation here: https://www.youtube.com/embed/IMpiClEOOcU
Due to the nature of this webinar, we are also making the presentation slides available: The language of Covid-19: a special OED update_presentations Download
The questions that we were not able to address during the live presentation were passed on to the panellists and their answers are available to view here.
About the OED
How to use the OED
OED resources to support teaching and academic research in Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan
The OED is a powerful online linguistic resource, providing features, tools, and language data which are essential for academic research and teaching. However, the extent of the OED capabilities is not always explored to its full potential.
The Oxford University Press team – Dr Danica Salazar, World English Editor, and Ms Chen Zhou, Regional Customer Trainer, presented a session where they provided an overview of all the OED can offer.
Guest speaker Dr Lisa Lim, Associate Professor at Curtin University and ‘Language Matters’ columnist for the South China Morning Post, presented her perspective of how the OED can be used in academic and other professional research, within the realms of language contact and evolution within multicultural environments.
Watch the recording of this presentation here:
The Oxford English Dictionary for Chinese users: resources to support teaching and academic research
The OED is a powerful online linguistic resource, providing features, tools, and language data which are essential for academic research and teaching. However, the extent of the OED capabilities is not always explored to its full potential.
The Oxford University Press team – Dr Danica Salazar, World English Editor, and Ms Chen Zhou, Regional Customer Trainer, presented a session where they provided an overview of all the OED can offer.
Guest speaker Dr Zhong Ai, Lecturer in English at Shanghai Maritime University, presented her perspectives of how the OED can be used in academic research, with a particular focus on the language contact between English and Chinese, and Chinese loanwords in English.
Watch the recording of this presentation here:
The questions that we were not able to address during the live presentation were passed on to the panellists and their answers, as well as the presentation slides are available to view here.
OED Historical Thesaurus 15-min virtual tour
The Historical Thesaurus of the OED works as a taxonomic index of language history and, unlike a typical thesaurus, it is not just for looking up synonyms – instead, it can be used to explore the different words used for a particular meaning over time.
Kate Wild, OED Editor, and James McCracken, Language Engineer Manager, have taken us on a virtual tour of the OED Historical Thesaurus, covering its functionality, examples of use in research, and potential future developments.
The questions that we were not able to address during the live presentation were passed on to the panellists and their answers are available to view here.
You can also read the associated blog post written by panelist Kate Wild, and view our guide on how to use the Historical Thesaurus.
The Oxford English Dictionary for Japanese users: resources to support teaching and academic research
The OED is a powerful online linguistic resource, providing features, tools, and language data which are essential for academic research and teaching. However, the extent of the OED capabilities is not always explored to its full potential.
Join the Oxford University Press team – Dr Danica Salazar, World English Editor, and Ms Chen Zhou, Regional Customer Trainer, for a live interactive online session where they will provide an overview of all the OED can offer.
Watch the recording below.
The Oxford English Dictionary for Korean users: resources to support teaching and academic research
Korean universities, schools, and other education institutions can access the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) through an initiative by KERIS, a Korean governmental organization to promote and support education.
The OED is a powerful online linguistic resource, providing features, tools, and language data which are essential for academic research and teaching. However, the extent of the OED capabilities is not always explored to its full potential.
The Oxford University Press team – Dr Danica Salazar, World English Editor, Ms Chen Zhou, Regional Customer Trainer, Mr Won Jung, Product Executive – and Dr Jieun Kiaer, Young Bin Min-KF Associate Professor of Korean Language and Linguistics, University of Oxford, presented a session where they provided an overview of all the OED can offer. Watch the recording
Making the Most of the Oxford English Dictionary (US)
Katherine Martin, Head of U.S. Dictionaries at Oxford University Press, presented about exploring the OED to make full use of its resources for research and teaching. She gave a virtual tour of the OED, showing how to unlock the potential of the historical and linguistic data in the dictionary’s entries. She also provided an overview of some of the OED teaching resources available.
Watch the recording of this presentation here:
Making the Most of the Oxford English Dictionary (UK)
Fiona McPherson, Senior Editor – OED New Words at Oxford University Press, presented about exploring the OED to make full use of its resources for research and teaching. She gave a virtual tour of the OED, showing how to unlock the potential of the historical and linguistic data in the dictionary’s entries.
Watch the recording of this presentation here:
Processes and methodology
The Oxford English Dictionary Text Annotator prototype tool
The OED Text Annotator, an OED experimental research tool, allows users to input a digital version of a chosen text for analysis. The user will receive back a version in which each lexical token has been annotated with OED information, including etymology and date range. The version which is being developed now is optimized for post-1750 text, but if our users are excited by the tool, we plan to develop the product to be functional across all time periods of the English language.
Emily Hoyland, Product Manager, Tania Styles, Revision Editor, and James McCracken, Language Engineering Manager, demonstrated the tool and its capabilities in this short online talk, and explain how you can test it yourself.
Our guest speaker, Dr Claudia Roberta Combei, NLP Manager at the Università di Bologna, Italy, detailed how she has been using the Text Annotator in her research mapping language variation and change in political discourse, focusing on inaugural addresses by US Presidents from 1789 to 2009.
Express your interest in testing the OED Text Annotator here.
Watch the recording of this presentation here:
OED Labs: exploring the Oxford English Dictionary’s prototype tools
With the aim of offering researchers new, more direct, and more flexible ways to access the OED’s massive curated dataset and to gain richer insights in the English language, we have started the OED Labs initiative, by developing new digital tools and functionality for the exploration of the OED.
Tania Styles, Editor: Revision and Etymology, and James McCracken, Language Engineering Manager, presented a live interactive online session where they provided an overview of the latest tools and functionality under development.
This webinar is of interest to researchers across all disciplines interested in potential partnerships to help shape the development of new digital tools that harness the power of the OED aid the evolution of academic research.
Watch the recording of this presentation here:
The accompanying presentation slides and Jupyter notebook code are available below.OED Labs: exploring the Oxford English Dictionary’s prototype toolsDownloadCode for Jupyter notebookDownload
What’s in a pronunciation? British and U.S. transcription models in the OED
Dr Catherine Sangster, Executive Editor: Pronunciations for Oxford Languages at Oxford University Press, and Dr Matthew Moreland, freelance pronunciation editor and Phonetics Lecturer at the University of East Anglia, have presented an interactive online talk in which they traced the evolution of OED’s pronunciation models, discussed their scope, and explored their current and future state.
Watch the recording of this presentation here:
The questions which could not be addressed during the session were answered by the panelists and are available to view here.
History
Building Dictionaries with Crowdsourcing
Dr Sarah Ogilvie, former Director of Global Partnerships at Oxford Languages, Oxford University Press, spoke about how you can get involved in collecting words for the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).
David Martin, Principal Editor and Head of the New Words Group, OED, explained how a word gets into the dictionary once it is submitted by a member of the public.
Find out how a dictionary is created: now and in the past, without the help of technology. Follow a word’s journey until it is included in the dictionary, the reasons behind it, and why some words will never make it.
Please note that this presentation is available in audio only.
The OED and Research
General
The Oxford English Dictionary for Korean users: resources to support teaching and academic research
Korean universities, schools, and other education institutions can access the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) through an initiative by KERIS, a Korean governmental organization to promote and support education.
The OED is a powerful online linguistic resource, providing features, tools, and language data which are essential for academic research and teaching. However, the extent of the OED capabilities is not always explored to its full potential.
The Oxford University Press team – Dr Danica Salazar, World English Editor, Ms Chen Zhou, Regional Customer Trainer, Mr Won Jung, Product Executive – and Dr Jieun Kiaer, Young Bin Min-KF Associate Professor of Korean Language and Linguistics, University of Oxford, presented a session where they provided an overview of all the OED can offer.
Case studies
Major health crises and the OED: language evolution and challenges in health communication
Language has had to adapt rapidly and repeatedly this year due to the Covid-19 pandemic – but what are the challenges faced when new medical terminology needs to be used within many varieties of English, and also with non-English speakers?
Join Dr Danica Salazar, OED World English Editor, and Richard Karl Deang, PhD candidate at the University of Virginia, for an interactive online presentation that will combine insights from medical anthropology and lexicography to address the following questions:
Watch the recording of this presentation here:
The questions that we were not able to address during the live presentation were passed on to the panellists and their answers are available to view here.
Applying a semantic tool to the OED: the Linguistic DNA Project
The Linguistic DNA project has designed a new computational linguistic approach to model historical word meanings by identifying and ranking a specific kind of lexical co-occurrence: co-occurring non-adjacent lexical trios in discursive spans of text.
Dr Seth Mehl, post-doctoral researcher at the University of Sheffield, shows us how this tool can be used to mine texts and identify the co-occurrence of specific lemmas, investigate the implication of these patterns on meaning, and inform the way definitions are written and presented by the OED.
Watch the webinar below, and read the associated blog article by Dr Mehl: Investigating the Linguistic DNA of life, body, and soul.
The questions which could not be addressed during the session were answered by the panelist and are available to view here.
Using the OED to investigate the implications of Douglas’s lexical choices in the Eneados
Written by Gavin Douglas in 1513, is the first full translation of the Aeneid in a form of English and one of the first instances where ‘Scots’ is used as a linguistic identifier.
The Eneados, written by Gavin Douglas in 1513, is the first full translation of the Aeneid in a form of English and one of the first instances where ‘Scots’ is used as a linguistic identifier.
Megan Bushnell from the English Faculty, University of Oxford, presented her research into Douglas’ lexical choices through a corpus-based approach.
Watch the recording of the presentation here:
The OED and historical text collections: discovering new words
This session provided an overview of the University of Helsinki’s research on neologism use, and how the OED can be used in digital humanities research generally.
If you’re interested in historical sociolinguistics, historical lexicology and lexicography, or in the complexities of applying computational methods to historical data, this talk is for you.
This webinar also offers the chance to hear directly from Dr Säily and Dr Mäkelä about what the future holds for this and other projects using the OED, and what they wish they knew before starting the project.
Watch the recording of this presentation here:
OED Labs and other data tools
OED Labs: exploring the Oxford English Dictionary’s prototype tools
With the aim of offering researchers new, more direct, and more flexible ways to access the OED’s massive curated dataset and to gain richer insights in the English language, we have started the OED Labs initiative, by developing new digital tools and functionality for the exploration of the OED.
Tania Styles, Editor: Revision and Etymology, and James McCracken, Language Engineering Manager, presented a live interactive online session where they provided an overview of the latest tools and functionality under development.
This webinar is of interest to researchers across all disciplines interested in potential partnerships to help shape the development of new digital tools that harness the power of the OED aid the evolution of academic research.
Watch the recording of this presentation here:
The accompanying presentation slides and Jupyter notebook code are available below.
The Cross-Dictionary Sense Linking Platform at Oxford Languages
The Cross-Dictionary Monolingual Sense Linking system (XD-MoSeLink) is a platform for linking dictionaries at the sense level developed at Oxford Languages.
It has been partly developed within the scope of the EU-funded Prêt-à-Llod project, which aims to generate methodologies for linking language data.
Oxford Languages’ Roser Saurí, Language Technology Strategist, Julian Grosse, Language Engineer, and Eirini Kouvara, Language Engineer, presented XD-MoSeLink in an online interactive session where they provided an overview of the platform and its use cases, functionality and the approach to its implementation.
Watch the recording of this presentation here:
Oxford Languages and Prêt-à-Llod’s Cross-Dictionary Annotation Tool
Meritxell Gonzàlez, Language Engineer at Oxford University Press, the creator of the Cross-Dictionary Annotation Tool (XD-AT), presented session about this web-based tool developed as part of the Prêt-à-Llod project.
When aligning senses we can see that they are not always fully equivalent: sometimes one of the senses extends beyond the meaning conveyed by the others. XD-AT was developed to assist lexicographers to classify sense alignment distinctions between senses already aligned. It can also be extended into a general tool for marking up cross-dictionary mappings at the sense level.
Watch the recording of this webinar:
The questions which could not be addressed during the session were answered by the panelist and are available to view here.
World English
>Major health crises and the OED: language evolution and challenges in health communication
Language has had to adapt rapidly and repeatedly this year due to the Covid-19 pandemic – but what are the challenges faced when new medical terminology needs to be used within many varieties of English, and also with non-English speakers?
Join Dr Danica Salazar, OED World English Editor, and Richard Karl Deang, PhD candidate at the University of Virginia, for an interactive online presentation that will combine insights from medical anthropology and lexicography to address the following questions:
Watch the recording of this presentation here:
The questions that we were not able to address during the live presentation were passed on to the panellists and their answers are available to view here.
>Mama put in the OED: World Englishes and the Oxford English Dictionary
Dr Danica Salazar, OED World English Editor, and Mr Kingsley Ugwuanyi, one of OUP’s valued Nigerian English consultants, discussed how different varieties of World English are being included in the OED, the processes around this, and how researchers can get involved.
Watch the webinar below, and read the accompanying blog piece by Dr Danica Salazar on the OED blog: Circuit breakers, PPEs, and Veronica buckets: World Englishes and Covid-19.
There were many a few questions from the audience which we ran out of time to address on the live webinar. These have been passed on to the panelists and will be posted here soon – watch this space!