Author Archive
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Posted by Laine Redpath Cole on July 12, 2012
shoogle (verb) a Scots word meaning to shake Just shoogle it about a bit and it’ll come loose. (Submitted from the United Kingdom) There were a lot of new words added to the Open Dictionary over the last week. Here’s a list: completist, nominative determinism, Libor, net neutrality, GLT, telephone number salary, run out of [...]
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Posted by Laine Redpath Cole on June 28, 2012
Anybody can add a word and its definition to the Open Dictionary. Every week I choose a word from recent entries to rattle on about. Petaflop is this week’s word. petaflop (noun) a measure of a computer’s processing speed. It can be expressed as a thousand trillion floating point operations per second Its speed? A [...]
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Posted by Laine Redpath Cole on June 21, 2012
baby box (noun) a box where where people can leave unwanted babies, who are then cared for by the authorities The United Nations is increasingly concerned at the spread in Europe of “baby boxes” where infants can be secretly abandoned by parents, warning that the practice “contravenes the right of the child to be known [...]
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Posted by Laine Redpath Cole on June 14, 2012
granular (adjective) (used about data and information) broken down into small separate items The association of group practice administrators asked CMS to provide more granular identification of all entities that fund, receive and administer insurance claims. (Submitted from the United Kingdom) Last week Orin Hargraves wrote a post here entitled “Going granular” about this very [...]
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Posted by Laine Redpath Cole on June 07, 2012
aptonym (noun) (also aptronym) a person’s name that is appropriate to their job An example of an aptonym is the current UK Lord Chief Justice, whose name and title is Lord Judge. (Submitted from the United Kingdom) Doing a quick run-through of our bloggers and guest-bloggers I thought I might come up with at least [...]
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Posted by Laine Redpath Cole on May 31, 2012
gender-neutral (adjective) 1. gender-neutral language does not refer specifically to males or females and so can be used when talking about either sex The ‘singular’ use of they, them, and themselves partly solves the problems raised by the lack of a gender-neutral pronoun in English. 2. relating to policies or ideas that seek to avoid [...]
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Posted by Laine Redpath Cole on May 30, 2012
This month’s question isn’t an uncommon one, but it always provides interesting responses and a lot of debate: What word exists in English that you have found to be missing in whatever other language you speak (or in your native language) or/and what word exists in that other language that is missing in English? Here [...]
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Posted by Laine Redpath Cole on May 17, 2012
zugzwang (noun) in a game such as chess, a player is in zugzwang when it is their turn to move and whatever move they make will leave them in a weaker position The Spanish debt-drama shows that Europe is in Zugzwang – a situation in chess when there is no useful move – every possible [...]
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Posted by Laine Redpath Cole on May 10, 2012
We are constantly monitoring the language to ensure that we keep an up-to-date record. You can be a part of this enterprise by suggesting a word for our Open Dictionary. Every Thursday Laine Redpath-Cole picks a new entry and goes on about it for a bit. This week’s word is: gender reveal (noun) the practice [...]
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Posted by Laine Redpath Cole on May 02, 2012
This post is published in the ‘Live English’ channel which provides content for our Global English crowd: international users of English. Every month we ask our contributing bloggers a question about English and its quirks. The last question was about politeness and April’s question was about synonyms. What’s your favourite synonym and why? Personally, I [...]
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