Tag Archives: digital humanities

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 […]

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 […]

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

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 […]

Another Review of The Life of Words

In the July 2022 issue of Modern Language Review, a short review by Mia Gaudern. Gaudern is the author of the very good The Etymological Poetry of W. H. Auden, J. H. Prynne, and Paul Muldoon (OUP, 2020), published virtually at the same time by the same press, so she very much knows her stuff […]

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

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 […]

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.

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.

A Variorum OED

The Oxford English Dictionary is a notoriously patchy text, having been written and re-written over a span of 130 years or so. In a recent post I put together a graphic representation of this, coloring bits from different editions, additional series and supplements. But even an up-to-date, revised entry in OED3 is a patchwork, combining […]