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Academic Insights for the Thinking World
Like most postcards, this post comes many days after I have returned from Oxford and the 80th anniversary celebration of the OED. My last post left off on Monday after our lunch at the Eagle and Child Pub where Simon Winchester and Ammon Shea joined us for fish and chips and pints of English beer.
An interactive crossword puzzle to celebrate the OED’s 80th birthday.
‘The Oxford English Dictionary: Past, Present, and Future’ at the Bodleian Library, Oxford.
Among the many interesting talks from senior editors of the OED, this morning we had Fiona McPherson telling us about how a new word is added, and the processes they go through to do it. Fiona and her team collect suggestions for words (or “lexical items”) to be added in a variety of ways.
Sarah Russo’s first entry about her trip to Oxford to celebrate the OED’s 80th birthday.
Ammon Shea tells us why book spines inspire him.
Ammon Shea on reading the OED.
All dictionaries have mistakes. Ghost words creep in, there are occasional misspellings, or perhaps the printer was hung over one day and misplaced some punctuation. In addition to these normal forms of human error there are others that are created by language, as it continues its inexorable change.
Welcome to the world, sixth edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary!
Ben’s column this week looks at the fascinating history of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. He explains how the OED, quite possibly OUP’s most important book (well, series of books), got trimmed to a manageable two volumes and why this development was important.
A closer look at the most recent OED update.
On Tuesday 5 August 2014, Ammon Shea, author of Reading the OED and Bad English, leads a discussion on Shakespeare’s King Lear. Each summer, Oxford University Press USA and Bryant Park in New York City partner for their summer reading series Word for Word Book Club.
Several months ago, John McGrath of Wordie interviewed me for this blog. He asked me about my favorite words that I had come across in reading the OED and I gave him a list of what they were at the time. But words can be capricious things, and the ones of which I am fondest are constantly changing.
Every year, a group of people at OUP USA put our heads together and come up with a Word of the Year. This is an example of a word (or expression) that we feel has attracted a great deal of new interest in the year to date. It need not have been coined within the past twelve months (although it generally is a new word). It does not have to be a word that will stick around for a good length of time (it is very difficult to accurately predict which new words will have staying power). It does not even have to be a word that we plan on introducing into the dictionary (at least, not unless it seems fairly certain that it will stick around for a while).
Ammon Shea reveals how the Oxford Word of the Year is chosen.
Ammon Shea explores the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary.