Tag Archives: lexicography

Interview with Paul Muldoon

Here are some excerpts from an interview I did with Paul Muldoon a couple of years ago, which focused on dictionaries and etymology. A full .pdf version of the interview can be downloaded here: [Interview with Paul Muldoon]. PM: I’ve never really been into the OED Online. Maybe I should. I think I might even […]

09.09.2015 – 14:26 | By D-AW | Posted in Criticism, Etymology, Lexicography, Poetry | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Introducing the LOW Team

The recent Ontario Early Researcher Award [See “Big Boost for The Life of Words“] turned what had been largely a one-man show into a multi-person operation involving a number of research assistants and associates. To give them their due, I’ve created a team profiles page where they introduce themselves and their interests. I’ll keep this […]

07.08.2015 – 12:51 | By D-AW | Posted in Digital Humanities | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

Big boost for The Life of Words

This news just released: The Life of Words is getting a major boost, in the form of a $150,00 grant from the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation, UWaterloo, and St Jerome’s University, to fund my research on poetry and the Oxford English Dictionary. The Early Researcher Award provides $100,000 in funding from the Ministry […]

09.06.2015 – 16:01 | By D-AW | Posted in Digital Humanities, Lexicography, Poetry | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

Method as Tautology

Although it has been available for a while in the advanced access section of Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, and before that Literary and Linguistic Computing, my article on digital methods in literary research has recently been published in its final version. The full bibliographic details are: Williams, David-Antoine. “Method as Tautology in the Digital […]

21.05.2015 – 11:42 | By D-AW | Posted in Criticism, Digital Humanities, Etymology, Lexicography, Poetry | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (2)

Compounding Joyce

LOW on demand! This afternoon the Twitter threw up this query, following on from my last post on cutthroat compounds [Catchall for Cutthroats]: Well, here at The Life of Words, we aim to please. Since I’ve been mucking around with Python scripts to get at OED’s combinational formations (those bits typically at the end of […]

18.05.2015 – 18:44 | By D-AW | Posted in Digital Humanities, Lexicography, Poetry | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (7)

Catchall for cutthroats

What is the difference between a catch-all and a catch-phrase? Both are compounds formed as Verb+Noun, but in catch-all, the noun is the direct object of the verb, whereas in catch-phrase it is the subject. That is, a catch-all is something that catches all things, whereas a catch-phrase is not something that catches phrases – […]

15.05.2015 – 17:33 | By D-AW | Posted in Digital Humanities, Etymology, Lexicography, Poetry | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (7)

Subsequent OED Quotations

You sometimes hear that Shakespeare contributed more words to the English language than anyone else. This claim is based on searches of the quotation evidence in the 2nd edition of the OED. In OED2, Shakespeare is the most-cited single-author source [33,131 quotations], and the most first-cited source in an entry [first evidence for 2,017 words], […]

21.10.2014 – 17:44 | By D-AW | Posted in Digital Humanities, Lexicography, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

“Pneumatic Bliss” – Eliot’s Breasty OED Entry

More from the T. S. Eliot / Oxford English Dictionary files [for background, see “Did TSE use OED, SOED, or COD?” and “Eliotic OED“]. In the latter post, I noted that 0.0135% of OED definitions contain the phrase “[with/in] allusion to” and that two of these are to poems by Eliot. Here are lines from […]

13.10.2014 – 15:24 | By D-AW | Posted in Language and Literature in Society, Lexicography | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments (2)

Eliotic OED

[UPDATE 9/15: If what follows interests you at all please see this update: “Two Notes on T. S. Eliot and the OED“] OED editor Robert Burchfield was responsible for adding Woolfian, Poundian, Joycean, Yeatsian, and Audenesque to the dictionary while preparing the Supplement of 1976-86 (later incorporated into the Second Edition, OED2). There’s no Eliotesque or […]

06.10.2014 – 18:45 | By D-AW | Posted in Language and Literature in Society, Lexicography, Poetry | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (4)

Did TSE use OED, SOED, or COD?

[UPDATE 9/15: If what follows interests you at all please see this update: “Two Notes on T. S. Eliot and the OED“] Or, Possum’s Practical Books of Words. On the internet and everywhere else people are confusing the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) with other Oxford English dictionaries, such as the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (SOED), […]

03.10.2014 – 20:22 | By D-AW | Posted in Lexicography, Poetry | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (4)