Oomphy Wordsmithery of the Anglosphere: New Entries in the Shorter OED
Welcome to the world, sixth edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary!
How the OED Got Shorter
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.
Friday procrastination: link love – OED, BEA and NPR!
Lots of Friday link love!
OED updates
A closer look at the most recent OED update.
Supper with an etymologist
It does not require much philological preparation to guess that supper is a word containing the root sup- and the suffix -er. Yet in the days of King Alfred and even much later, the inhabitants of Anglo-Saxon England had no such word.
A few etymological pebbles
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.
The level of our expertise: the perplexing verb baffle
What does it mean when a dictionary says: “Origin unknown”? We will soon see that the concept of “unknown” has several levels.
Seeing red
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.
Aftermath and its kin
My story today is about several words referring to aftermath. All of them have a rather confusing sound shape.
In and out of the box
Today’s story is about boxing (that is, about the word box).
Spelling bee is back. So am I
Spelling Bee is back.
Restive people never rest
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.”
Much hubbub about very little
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.
Hogs, hedges, hedgehogs, and BA’s
About a year ago (to be exact, on February 19, 2025), I discussed the origin of some obscure idioms, the hardest of which was to go the whole hog, though a hog on ice also makes one wonder.
Unabridged: some thoughts on a new book about dictionaries and words
Unabridged refers to the title of Webster’s great dictionary. The author of the book, published by Grove Atlantic Monthly Press (New York) in October 2025, is Stefan Fatsis.
Endless trouble with breeches
The trouble begins with the pronunciation of the word breeches. Why does breeches (seemingly so, in the US) often rhyme with riches, rather than reaches?