Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
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.
My story today is about several words referring to aftermath. All of them have a rather confusing sound shape.
To the modern eye, this man in his dark suit probably looks perfectly normal—perhaps even boring. But what if this ubiquitous uniform is actually one of the most powerful and heavily engineered political institutions in Western history?
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.”
Soon after the blog Oxford Etymologist came into existence on March 5, 2006 (more than twenty years ago!), I wrote a post on the word hubba-hubba.