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“History of English”
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…
Find out moreMaking use of new resources in LGBT history
The availability of three new online archives made us wonder what new evidence we could uncover by returning to some of the entries which we’ve already revised…
Find out moreCha before tea: finding earlier mentions in a corpus of early English letters (part 2)
In the first part of this blog post, we discussed an antedating for tea found in the Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEEC). That instance, in a 1643 letter by…
Find out moreCha before tea: finding earlier mentions in a corpus of early English letters (part 1)
Who creates and adopts new vocabulary in the history of English? A team of University of Helsinki researchers discuss new antedatings for both ‘cha’ and ‘tea’ from the time of the English Civil War:
Find out moreStill dung wet? Discovering an unexpected lexical survival on Twitter
Revising ‘dung’ revealed a puzzling case of possible lexical resurrection, but is it a case of continued currency, for which the evidence is missing, or a case of independent re-formation?
Find out moreWords from the 21st century
In the twenty-first century, at the dawn of the Anthropocene (2000) era, the human race began to abandon analogue socializing for the seductive delights of the digital ether. The twitterati’s…
Find out moreWords from the 1990s
It was the decade of all things cyber-: cybercrime, cybersex, cybershoppers, cyberwar. The main fear in the cybercafé was the dreaded millennium bug, which threatened to make the world’s computer systems crash when the clocks chimed midnight on 31 December 1999.
Find out moreWords from the 1980s
The habits of post-war austerity had begun to chafe in the 1960s. The economic shocks of the 1970s did little to permit the loosening of shackles, but in the 1980s…
Find out moreDope and sex and rock ‘n’ roll: slang lexicography with Jonathon Green (part two)
In celebration of the 90th anniversary of the OED’s completed First Edition, slang specialist and lexicographer Jonathon Green sat down with Henry Hitchings, a Consultant Editor for the OED, to…
Find out moreDope and sex and rock ‘n’ roll: slang lexicography with Jonathon Green (part one)
‘My feeling is that I don’t subscribe to a specific definition, rather the sense that slang has a pervasive state of mind. I would suggest that there is an underlying strain that goes through the entire slang lexis, which is sedition.’
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