Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
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.
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.
My story today is about several words referring to aftermath. All of them have a rather confusing sound shape.
Over the last few decades, scholarship in the arts has undergone a significant shift towards questions and topics related to animals and our relationships with them.
When a collection passes 500 titles, it’s tempting to focus on the milestone. But what’s more interesting is the story behind the number, the years of collaboration between authors, editors, institutions, funders, and readers who share a commitment to making scholarship easier to discover, read, teach, and build upon.
Today’s story is about boxing (that is, about the word box).
Spelling Bee is back.
Some parts of the story I am going to tell can be found in most dictionaries, but it is the attempts to connect a few distant dots that may be interesting to those who wonder “where words come from.”
My grandmother was one of those speakers who had an “r” in the word wash, pronouncing it “warsh”. For her, the nation’s capital was “Warshington”, D.C., and the vegetable was a “squarsh.”