Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
It does not require much philological preparation to guess that supper is a word containing the root sup- and the suffix -er. Yet in the days of King Alfred and even much later, the inhabitants of Anglo-Saxon England had no such word.
Teaching, researching, and writing about gender—about what gender relations could be in a just world if we put the work into imagining that just world into existence—feels a lot like scrabbling uphill over dangerous terrain only to find mountains beyond the mountains we have already scaled.
It is amazing how many words Indo-European languages have for “supreme ruler; potentate.” In English, the main one is king.
Salamanders can regenerate lost limbs, but mammals cannot. Recent discoveries about cell potency and positional information are helping scientists understand why, while opening new possibilities for regenerative medicine.
Eurovision celebrated its 70th anniversary in Vienna amid controversy over political neutrality, voting integrity, and national withdrawals. Philip V. Bohlman considers the performances that defined Eurovision 2026 and what they reveal about the contest’s future.
Environmental change is no longer an abstract concern. It is encountered in daily life, in regional disruptions, and in global debates.
Why do we say chicken and egg but never egg and chicken? English has hundreds of these fixed binomial expressions, each following subtle linguistic rules. From Yakov Malkiel’s early studies to the forensic clue that helped catch the Unabomber, binomials reveal how deeply word order shapes meaning.
The readers of this blog may have noticed that I usually try to stay away from the oldest words in English, those with ancient Indo-European roots.
Although the concept of visual abstract began even before the widespread use of the internet, with journals like Angewandte Chemie and Tetrahedron Letters featuring graphical abstracts in the late 20th century, it wasn’t widely used across all journals until the surge in scholarly papers and information overload.
Historian Alexander Mikaberidze reframes the Louisiana Purchase as part of a global story of empire, revolution, and political ambition. He discusses archival discoveries, Napoleonic history, and why the Purchase still matters today.
The readers of this blog must have noticed how often I suggest solutions connected with sound imitation. Time and again I say that a certain noun or verb owes its origin to onomatopoeia.
What does it mean when a dictionary says: “Origin unknown”? We will soon see that the concept of “unknown” has several levels.
To celebrate the publication of our 800th Very Short Introduction, we’ve put together a timeline featuring our series milestones, from our first Introduction co-authored by famed classicist Mary Beard, all the way to our upcoming introduction to rock ‘n’ roll.
Legal education, at least in the Anglosphere, has been undergoing a quiet but very recognisable transformation. The case study method, developed by Christopher Columbus Langdell at Harvard in the 1870s, is steadily giving way to ‘authentic’, ‘real life’ or ‘experiential’ learning, wherein theory and practice are intermeshed.
The history of color names presents countless problems, and the literature on the subject is enormous. Today’s post is only about some curious uses of the word red in English.
Recently, I went to a talk on telicity in verbs. If the term is unfamiliar to you, you are not alone.