Tag Archives: Oxford English Dictionary

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)

Little Miss Bossy Pants

In the comments to a Facebook share of my previous post on gendered language on Ratemyprofessors.com [“Vivid Unconscious Biases“], JB, a friend of a friend, writes: “bossy” is an inherently gendered term and is always used as an insult. I can’t remember ever hearing it applied to a man. Indeed, it strikes me that calling […]

11.02.2015 – 17:05 | By D-AW | Posted in Digital Humanities, Language and Literature in Society | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (1)

Published: “Geoffrey Hill’s Etymological Crux”

I’m happy to say that Modern Philology has just published a longish article of mine on etymology in Geoffrey Hill’s work, called “All corruptible things: Geoffrey Hill’s Etymological Crux.” A self-archived copy of the article may be downloaded by clicking here. [Note that a revised version of this article appears in my 2020 monograph, The […]

29.01.2015 – 16:50 | By D-AW | Posted in Criticism, Etymology, Poetry | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments (1)

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 (2)

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)

Misunderweared

A song from my early youth came back to me the other day. Here’s the first verse, with a rough translation in italics: Le bon roi Dagobert                       Good King Dagobert A mis sa culotte à l’envers ;           Put on his culotte backwards ; Le grand saint Éloi                         The great Saint Eligius Lui dit : Ô […]

29.09.2014 – 14:33 | By D-AW | Posted in Language and Literature in Society | Tagged , , , , | Comments (4)

Snowclone Sandwich

“Snowclone” is a word for a kind of transferable, reusable pattern of phrase, such as the original “X have Y words for Z” (on the pattern “Eskimos have fifty-five (or pick your number) words for snow“, so transferable to “The French have no word for entrepreneur“, or whatever), or “X is the new Y” (on […]

23.09.2014 – 13:47 | By D-AW | Posted in Etymology, Language and Literature in Society, Lexicography | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)