Posts Tagged ‘new words’
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Posted by Michael Rundell on February 13, 2012
The lexicographer’s rule of thumb is that things always take longer than you expect. Samuel Johnson underestimated the time it would take him to complete his dictionary, and James Murray – the original Editor of the OED – fared even worse in the prediction business: what started as a 10-year project took over 40 years [...]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on February 08, 2012
In the previous post on this topic, we looked at the criteria traditionally applied by dictionary-makers when considering new words for inclusion. The question is as old as lexicography itself. When he wrote his Plan of an English Dictionary in 1747, Dr Johnson noted that it is ‘not easy to determine by what rule of [...]
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Posted by Stan Carey on February 06, 2012
The attention paid to grammar and style can overshadow something equally significant about language: that it is so often and so naturally playful. In our love of puns and Scrabble, riddles and nonsense, rhyming slang and literary experimentation, we see the instinctive inclination to play with words and letters as though they were an abstract [...]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on February 02, 2012
In Kate Atkinson’s recent novel, Started Early, Took My Dog (2010), there’s an exchange between two of the characters. When one of them mentions a large sum of money, we read that Kelly, the other character, ‘suddenly meerkatted to attention’. Does this mean we have a new verb on our hands, to meerkat? Should it be [...]
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Posted by Orin Hargraves on January 30, 2012
Humans never outgrow a fascination with new playthings, but after a certain age it is unseemly and unrealistic to expect a steady stream of surprise gifts from doting parents, aunts, uncles, and grandparents. One consolation for this loss is new words: clever coinages come along all the time to supply our craving for novelty. A [...]
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Posted by Stan Carey on December 26, 2011
As the year ends, lexicographers and other word geeks traditionally put their heads together to choose or vote for a word of the year (WOTY). It’s not that simple, of course: different groups pick different words in different ways for different reasons. And it’s not always a word – other “vocabulary items” like phrases and [...]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on September 15, 2011
About 20 years ago, I was interviewed by the Education Editor of the London Observer about a new dictionary I’d been involved in. We had a wide-ranging conversation about the distinctive features of the new edition, and much of this focussed on the use of language corpora – at that time still a novelty. The [...]
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Posted by Aneta Naumoska on September 01, 2011
Gender English month continues with a guest post by Aneta Naumoska, a Lector of Contemporary English Language at the “Blaze Koneski” Faculty of Philology in Skopje, Macedonia. Aneta’s first book, Gender Marking in the English Language, was published in December 2010. Her particular interests lie in the field of Sociolinguistics. She is also an avid [...]
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Posted by Stan Carey on February 22, 2011
You might have encountered some of the new words being used to describe different types of holiday – humorous variations on vacation, such as daycation and staycation. Daycation was a BuzzWord here on Macmillan Dictionary; Kerry’s article also explained greycation and naycation. We’ve come across mancation before, in the context of man-words, and a blog [...]
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Posted by Beth Penfold on December 31, 2010
Thanks to all of you who had a go at our Christmas quiz – we hope you enjoyed it! Here, as promised are the correct definitions for each new word. How did you do? Let us know your scores, and your thoughts about the quiz in the Comments section. New word: snowclone (SNOWclone) A type [...]
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