Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
‘Where do you want to go today?’ served as the tagline for software giant Microsoft’s global marketing campaign running through the mid-1990s. The accompanying advertisements were replete with flashy images of people around the world of all ages, ethnicities, and backgrounds engaging in a diverse range of activities.
In conducting research for The Things She Carried: A Cultural History of the Purse in America, Kathleen B. Casey discovered how one everyday object—the purse—could function as a portal to the past.
It sometimes seems that the greater the exposure of a body part, the greater the chance of its having an ancient (truly ancient!) name.
I often tell my students that biology has become a data-driven field. Certainly, there’s a general sense that methods related to biological sequences (that is methods in genomics and bioinformatics) have become very widespread. But what does that really mean?
Allow me to introduce a group of seemingly ill-assorted words. Each member of this group occupies a secure place in the vocabulary of English, but no one knows for sure whether they belong together.
The advent of the World Wide Web in the turn of the last century completely transformed the way most people find and absorb information. Rather than a world in which information is stored in books or housed in libraries, we have a world where all of the information in the world is accessible to everyone.
A while ago, a reader pointed me to a comment on another writer’s OUPblog piece. The comment complained about a caption on a photo, an image of the painting “Adam and Eve in Paradise” by the seventeenth-century Flemish painter David Teniers the Younger.
Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen introduced the mystery of quantum entanglement (entanglement) in 1935 and it has been called “Einstein’s quantum riddle.” Many physicists and philosophers in foundations of quantum mechanics (foundations) have proposed solutions to Einstein’s quantum riddle, but no solution has received consensus support, which has led some to call entanglement “the greatest mystery in physics.”
Economists analyze data. Machine learning (ML) offers a powerful set of tools for doing just that. But while econometrics and ML share a foundation in statistics, their aims and philosophies often diverge.
We know that in English words beginning with kn- and gn- the first letter is mute. Even in English spelling, which is full of the most bizarre rules, this one causes surprise.
How very different the bridges of the first- and second-place songs, JJ’s “Wasted Love” for Austria and Yuval Raphael’s “New Day Will Rise” for Israel, were at Eurovision 2025. And how uncannily the same. Does love survive when tested by the seas and floods threatening to inundate it? The survival of love is both denied and affirmed, threatened but still buoyed by the precarity of hope.
In An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology, I called William L. Blackley’s 1869 book Word Gossip singularly uninformative, and I am sorry for that remark.
I received a letter with a question about the etymology of swag “booty; cockiness, etc.” The reader complained that dictionaries have nothing to say about the origin of this word. She is quite right.
In the spring of 1791, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, accompanied by Jefferson’s enslaved chef James Hemings, took a road trip. In six weeks, they covered more than 900 miles, travelling through New York, Vermont, Massachusetts, and Connecticut before returning across Long Island.
We often think of personal names as specific to an individual, and sometimes they are. Yet often they are not. After all, the same individual may go by more than one name.
The town where I live has a good newspaper. From time to time, it gives advice to its readers for avoiding language mistakes and for speaking correct English.