Tag Archives: dictionaries

Guest Post: Etymological Web

Arbel Groshaus has just wrapped up his Winter 2024 co-op term as an RA at TLOW, working on bibliographies, etymologies, and OED sources. Here he describes a project to build an etymological web to parse relationships in texts.   Hello Life of Words fans! I would like to introduce a project that I’ve been working […]

01.05.2024 – 09:02 | By AG | Posted in Digital Humanities, Etymology, Lexicography | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (0)

The New-Look OED: The End of the Entry

The new-look OED Online tosses a lot that was great, and unique, and real, about OED, while offering little new of value.

30.07.2023 – 10:09 | By D-AW | Posted in Digital Humanities, Language and Literature in Society, Lexicography, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Comments (17)

Published: Women’s Words in the OED

Now published in Review of English Studies, an article by me on the ways in which the Oxford English Dictionary has treated texts authored by women in its marshalling of citation evidence for English language lexis, from the first edition (1884-1928) to the current OED3 revision (2000-). The approach I take is driven by quantitative […]

03.06.2023 – 15:53 | By D-AW | Posted in Digital Humanities, Language and Literature in Society, Lexicography | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

OED Work on “Writing and Editing” Podcast

I talked with Wayne Jones the other day about my work on the Oxford English Dictionary. The result was this short piece on my plans for an updated OED bibliography and Variorum: 182. Enhancing the Oxford English Dictionary

28.05.2023 – 08:48 | By D-AW | Posted in Digital Humanities, Language and Literature in Society, Lexicography | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (14)

Money for a Variorum OED & OED Bibliography

Over the past many moons I’ve posted from time to time about my researches into the Oxford English Dictionary, and some of the interesting or puzzling or maddening or heartening things I’ve found there. A big theme lately has been the need for a Variorum, or track-changes, OED, which would allow researchers to compare the […]

05.11.2022 – 16:08 | By D-AW | Posted in Digital Humanities, Language and Literature in Society, Lexicography | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

Nae Mair for the Nonce?

Growlsome, guzzledom, panfrivolium – Oxford English Dictionary #OED doing away with “nonce-words” | Nae Mair for the Nonce? | The Life of Words

11.12.2021 – 15:19 | By D-AW | Posted in Lexicography, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (2)

OED “Transgender” Update Update

In my last post [“Why we need a Variorum OED: ‘Transgender’ ” 9/12/2020], I pointed to the OED entry for TRANSGENDER as it appeared in December 2020 as a good example of the need for a Variorum OED, which would label all elements (etymologies, definitions, quotations) with their individual revision histories. Well, in the last […]

24.03.2021 – 10:44 | By D-AW | Posted in Digital Humanities, Language and Literature in Society, Lexicography | Tagged , , , , | Comments (15)

Why We Need a Variorum OED: “Transgender”

The need for a Variorum–i.e. a detailed revision history for every published element of the OED since 1884–is becoming even more acute.

09.12.2020 – 15:04 | By D-AW | Posted in Digital Humanities, Language and Literature in Society, Lexicography | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (2)

Published: “Alien” vs. Editor: “World English” in the OED 1884-2020

This article discusses the changing ways in which the Oxford English Dictionary has recorded the vocabularies of ‘World English’ from the beginnings to the present day.

07.09.2020 – 09:31 | By D-AW | Posted in Digital Humanities, Etymology, Language and Literature in Society, Lexicography | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Seamus Heaney on Dictionaries

In the summer of 2012 Seamus Heaney wrote to me on some questions I had sent him about dictionaries and words and etymologies. Bits of what he had to say made it into a couple of talks I did around that time, but I recently rediscovered the original text, and thought it should see the […]

18.08.2020 – 19:58 | By D-AW | Posted in Etymology, Language and Literature in Society, Lexicography, Poetry, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Comments (3)