Tag Archives: neologism

European and Non-European English Etymons

This weekend I’ve been poking around in OED3’s etymologies, and it occurred to me that an interesting thing might be lay out all English words according to when they are first attested, and what language they come from. This morning I made a bunch of graphs, below. Before having a look, it’s worth mentioning that […]

22.01.2018 – 16:17 | By D-AW | Posted in Digital Humanities, Etymology, Lexicography | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Lurking Impactfuls

Today on the NPR I heard someone say, “even more impactfully” [link].  Knowing that anything to do with “impact” is peever-bait [of the “only teeth can be impacted” variety–see BBC Magazine: “Should “impact” ever be used as a verb?“], I was surprised to find that “impactfully” occurs unselfconsciously about once a day on Twitter, and […]

15.10.2017 – 12:56 | By D-AW | Posted in Digital Humanities, Etymology, Language and Literature in Society, Lexicography | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (2)

The Lifespan of Words (three ways)

Getting ready for DH2017 this morning, I found myself curious about the lifespan of English words–when they come into the language and when they fall out. So I got all the earliest and latest attestation dates for all the words in OED3, and plotted them out. Here are three graphs (“visualizations,” if you like), all […]

09.08.2017 – 09:38 | By D-AW | Posted in Digital Humanities, Lexicography | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

||-Tripping over tramlines-||

“Tramlines”, icydk, are those upright parallel bars that OED1 and OED2 editors used to indicate that a word was “alien or not fully naturalized”. So, for instance, zeitgeist you may recognize as a word of German origin, not infrequently heard in English. In OED1 (1928) it appeared as ||Zeitgeist, and this mark was preserved on […]

03.05.2017 – 09:19 | By D-AW | Posted in Language and Literature in Society, Lexicography | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Untrustable Assertions

Listening to the NPR today, I hear this from E. J. Dionne, commenting on GOP Congressman Kevin McCarthy’s astounding statements about the civic accomplishments of the Republican House: [Dionne] We’re going to have a lot of fun with him in terms of the English language. In that recent statement he invented the word “untrustable”. He […]

03.10.2015 – 01:35 | By D-AW | Posted in Language and Literature in Society, Lexicography | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

Thermo Pairs, a kind of poem

Latest in the “kind of poem” series [see here and here], this one based on false positives that turned up in my list of invented lexical combinations in James Joyce [“Compounding Joyce“].

19.05.2015 – 17:54 | By D-AW | Posted in Lexicography, Poetry | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)

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 (3)

Plural Fixation

Or, “How not to be a pedant with the OED.” I like a good hatchet job. Done well, the literary smack-down is thrilling and educative. Terry Eagleton on Richard Dawkins [“Lunging, flailing, mispunching”, LRB, 19.10.06] is among my favourite examples of the dark art: characterizing Dawkins’s idea of the Christian god as “some kind of […]

30.11.2014 – 20:37 | By D-AW | Posted in Etymology, Language and Literature in Society, Lexicography | Tagged , , , | Comments (1)

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 (1)