Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
Selfie – the Oxford Word of the Year for 2013 – is a neologism defined as “a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website”.
By Heather Wiebe
When I was charged with the task of updating the article on Benjamin Britten in Grove Music Online, I thought it would be a relatively simple matter. As Britten’s centenary year approached, it seemed an opportune moment, and the article was one I admired.
By Martyn Ould
Someone on even the most cursory visit to Oxford must surely see two fine buildings that once housed the University Press: the Sheldonian Theatre and the Clarendon Building, close to each other on today’s Broad Street. If they venture further afield, perhaps heading for the restaurants and bars along Walton Street, they also can’t fail to notice the neo-classical building that has been the Press’s current home since 1832. What they’ll never see however is the Press’s second home.
By Naonobu Noda and Yoshikazu Tanaka
Chrysanthemums (Chrysanthemum morifolium) are the second best-selling flowers after roses in worldwide. In Japan they are by far the most popular and the 16 petal chrysanthemum with sixteen tips is the imperial crest. Cultivated chrysanthemums have been generated by hybridization breeding of many wild species for hundreds or possibly thousands of years.
By Anne Secord
White’s classic text can be read as a shrewd exercise to encourage readers to follow a startlingly novel approach to studying the natural world. Most naturalists at that time based their natural systems and classifications of all living beings on the study of dead specimens in collections.
By Melissa Mohr
To celebrate selfie’s tenure as Word of the Year, here are some WOTYs from the past, which may shed some light on its development.
By Stuart George
On 10 July 2013, a potential 50 playing days of Test cricket – ten consecutive Test matches of up to five days each – between England and Australia began. Try explaining to an American how two national teams can play each other for 50 days (or even five days). Or how a match can be ended by “ bad light” in a floodlit stadium.
By Anatoly Liberman
There are many ways to be surprised (confounded, dumbfounded, stupefied, flummoxed, and even flabbergasted). While recently discussing this topic, I half-promised to return to it, and, although the origin of astonish ~ astound ~ stun is less exciting than that of amaze, it is perhaps worthy of a brief note.
By Katherine Connor Martin
Oxford’s lexicographers use the Oxford English Corpus (OEC), a 2-billion-word corpus of contemporary English usage gathered since 2000, to provide accurate descriptions of how English is used around the world in real life. A corpus is simply a collection of texts that are richly tagged so that they can be analyzed using software (we use the Sketch Engine).
The harsh restrictions that North American slaves faced between the sixteenth and nineteenth century led to the innovative ways to communicate through music. Many slaves sang songs and used their surrounding resources to create homemade instruments.
By Eric W. Orts
“Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” Keynes’ warning applies to debates about skyrocketing levels of executive compensation in the United States and elsewhere.
By G. O. Hutchinson
How could you have one novel, poem, children’s book, that wasn’t influenced by others? But people haven’t much considered what distinguishes literary interaction that jumps across languages and countries.
By Edwin Battistella
The annual Word of the Year selection by Oxford Dictionaries and others inspired me to an odd personal challenge last year. In November of 2011, about the time that Oxford Dictionaries were settling on squeezed middle as both the UK and US word of the year, I made a New Year’s Resolution for 2012.
By Donald Palmer
Wrongdoing in and by organizations is a common occurrence. Ronald Clement tracked firms listed among the Fortune 100 in 1999 and found that 40% had engaged in misconduct significant enough to be reported in the national media between 2000 and 2005.
When Oxford Dictionaries chose ‘selfie’ as their Word of the Year for 2013, we invited several scholars from different fields to share their thoughts on this emerging phenomenon.
By Sophie Goldsworthy
Back in 2001, there was a whole host of reference products online, and journals were well down that digital road. But books? Who on earth would want to read a whole book online? When the idea that grew into Oxford Scholarship Online was first mooted, it faced a lot of scepticism, in-house as well as out.