MLK: diversity
MLK using the word in 1967, more than. year before the OED’s earliest citation.
Another meaning of “snail mail”
My one submission to the OED.
The Dictionary People
Knowing a bit about rabbit holes, I know the importance of knowing when to stop. But I understand the impulse to keep going, for it’s unlikely that there will be another book about the OED’s Readers.
OED life
This visit to the OED offices includes “astirbroad,” “burner phone,” and “what the what.”
Blanchett’s OED
It’s not just Tom Hanks. Cate Blanchett, too, has the twenty-volume second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary on her bookshelves.
Hanks’s OED
Tom Hanks has the twenty-volume second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary on his bookshelves. As seen on Saturday Night Live tonight.
Word of the day: hunker
A trip through the OED.
Word of the day: cloakroom
It means several things.
Secret, secretary
Ammon Shea: “When I learned that secretary meant “one privy to a secret” during the fourteenth century I was utterly delighted.”
Words of the day: apricity, apricot
Does “apricot” have anything to do with “apricity”? No and yes.
NJ OED
The Oxford English Dictionary is looking for words from New Jersey.
The OED, a “moving document”
Will a third edition ever appear?
Word of the night: owl-hoot
The earliest meaning, now archaic and rare: “dusk, nightfall.”
Iambic beer?
For the splittest of seconds, I misread a word in the definition for “Kriek,” the Oxford English Dictionary Word of the Day.
Word of the day: nixie
“Post which cannot be forwarded by the postal services because it is illegibly or incorrectly addressed.”
“Hungh?”
An odd question in Mark Trail.
Word of the day: heirloom
Long story short: an heirloom isn’t a weaving machine, nor is it something looming in the distance. Nor is it related to Erroll Garner, though the rights to “Misty” would be quite a heirloom.
Cosmetic, cosmos
I wondered last night in a conversation with friends: could cosmetic and cosmos be related? Yes, they could be, and are.
Yoda, n.
“Yoda” is a new addition to the Oxford English Dictionary.
A colon followed by a dash
There’s a a name for it.
OED birthday words
Choose a year and get a word that entered the language that year.
Twenty-first-century OED slips
They still use paper.
OED wars
Did an OED editor delete words with foreign origins?
Word of the day: nemophilous
“To my joy and sheer wonder, your son Buddy has turned out to be utterly and thrillingly nemophilous!”
The word of the day: quaquaversal
A real word, from the OED.
The OED’s first-place verb
It’s “run.”
“I heart my dogs [sic] head”
Numerous news items on heart state that the OED had added the symbol ♥. Not so. It’s a new definition of the verb heart that has been added.
The OED, in and out of print
It may be online only
Rock the mic
Who was the first to rock the mic? The O.E.D. has the answer.
The OED siphon
"Siphon," a wrong definition