Tag Archives: digital humanities

LOWBot Goes a(n)-Antedating

In an earlier post, OED Antedating OED, I documented how OED3’s rate of antedating had improved dramatically since the revision kicked off in 2000, from around 35-40% of word entries antedated in the first five or six years of updates, to above 60% since 2012, noting that one reason for the improvement must be the […]

16.05.2020 – 16:04 | By D-AW | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (3)

New Map of Indigenous American Words in English

For some time I’ve been meaning to update my map of pathways into English of  Indigenous American Words, which was based on the Second (1989) Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. With a couple of hours to spare while watching the kids this week, I managed to get around to it, using data from the […]

21.03.2020 – 12:02 | By D-AW | Posted in Digital Humanities, Etymology, Lexicography | Tagged , , , , | Comments (10)

And we have Coverage!

Here’s the cover of my new book, out in April/May from OUP: [edit: now available at book stores and here]Image credit: “Iskandar and the Talking Tree”, from Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh (977-1010 CE), Bodleian MS. Ouseley Add.176, fol. 311v.  

17.02.2020 – 17:11 | By D-AW | Posted in Etymology, Lexicography, Poetry | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

More Precisions on Revisions

In the comments to my last post [OED3 Revision Revised for 2020] I posted this chart, in reply to a remark about projected completion: This implies that revision has slowed down somewhat in the last ten years, and even more in the last five. But it was pointed out to me elsewhere that entries per […]

15.01.2020 – 14:35 | By D-AW | Posted in Digital Humanities, Lexicography | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

OED3’s Revision Status (c. 2018.12.15)

Most people know that the OED is in the midst of a wholesale revision of legacy OED material dating back in some cases to the 1890s, in addition to the regular updates and additions we hear about in quarterly bulletins. This work started to be published almost 20 years ago, now, and may go on […]

02.12.2019 – 11:45 | By D-AW | Posted in Digital Humanities, Lexicography | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

OED Antedating OED

In 6 years, OED went from a 40% to a 60% antedating rate, a remarkable improvement.You want to know what the biggest antedating has been so far, don’t you? Well, I’ll tell you.

25.07.2019 – 14:02 | By D-AW | Posted in Digital Humanities, Lexicography, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Comments (6)

Boathouse Words

Q: What’s the difference between having a SQUIRREL FACE and having a FACE SQUIRREL? A:                      Generally speaking, if you want a word for a MORP that has FUZ, you call it a FUZ-MORP, right? And if there’s a FUZ that gets rid of your MORPS, […]

10.09.2018 – 09:19 | By D-AW | Posted in Digital Humanities, Language and Literature in Society, Lexicography | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)

Gender Shifts in American Names

Lately I’ve been working with several different gender-inference tools, tweaking them here and there to serve my purposes. Since I’m working with a historical dataset with about eight million records, from 1800 to today, once of the packages I’m using is the gender library for R by Lincoln Mullen, which uses historical US census and […]

24.04.2018 – 11:05 | By D-AW | Posted in Digital Humanities, Language and Literature in Society | Tagged , , | Comments (4)

“Juvescence” and other poetical “Errors”

This morning on the Twitter came this from @nemoloris: OED says “juvescence” is “irregular”, not “erroneous”, but (notorious TSE fan) Robert Burchfield himself called it a malformation (in his Eliot memorial lectures, I believe). Eliot’s defensive letter, sourced by @rngould, is worth keeping in mind: irregular needn’t be erroneous, and sometimes poets are looking to […]

29.01.2018 – 11:23 | By D-AW | Posted in Digital Humanities, Etymology, Lexicography, Poetry | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (8)

Englishing Non-European Words

My last post focussed on words that are formed within English from other English words with non-English origins. I mostly concentrated on European donor languages, because they make up the overwhelming majority, and show the most variation. But English Englishes wherever it goes, and non-European languages have contributed plenty of English words over the years. […]

26.01.2018 – 13:49 | By D-AW | Posted in Digital Humanities, Etymology, Lexicography | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (0)