The latest edition of the Oxford English Dictionary boasts 22,000 pages of definitions. While that may seem far from succinct, new research suggests the reference manual is meticulously organized to be as concise as possible — a format that mirrors the way our brains make sense of and categorize the countless words in our vast vocabulary. …
Read the rest of the article at EurekAlert
For those who think that society is obsessed with time, the concise Oxford English dictionary added support to the theory today in announcing that the word is the most commonly used noun in the English language.
Read the full article at Zee News
Counting from one to 1 million – physically saying 1 million words – is said to take 23 days. But to make 1 million words? According to one California high-tech executive and his roving band of “language police,” that feat has taken about 1,500 years for English speakers around the globe to execute. That magic date when the one-millionth English word will be born should fall between Sept. 1 and Nov. 30, 2006, according to Paul JJ Payack, founder of the Global Language Monitor.
Read the full article at CBS News
“Supergirls” made the list. So did “Shenzhou VI.” But topping the general list of buzzwords in the Chinese lexicon for 2005 was the phrase “maintaining advancement of Party members.”
Read the full article at Peoples Daily
A panel of linguists has decided the word that best reflects 2005 is “truthiness,” defined as the quality of stating concepts one wishes or believes to be true, rather than the facts. The American Dialect Society chose the word Friday after a runoff with terms related to Hurricane Katrina, such as “Katrinagate,” the scandal erupting from the lack of planning for the monster hurricane.
Read the full article at Washington Post
From the evocative Tom Cruise-inspired term “jump the couch,” meaning to exhibit frenetic or bizarre behavior, to the less colorful but more complex “integrity,” the words and expressions Americans favored in 2005 are jockeying for position on linguists’ and dictionary editors’ year-end lists.
Read the full article at Los Angeles Times
Parli Berluschese? Silvio Berlusconi might be criticised for his handling of the economy or his domination of the Italian media but no one can deny that he has worked wonders for the Italian language. According to 2006 Nuove Parole, a dictionary of Italian neologisms that was published this week by Sperling and Kupfer, 14 words have entered Italian that take as their stem the name of the Prime Minister.
Read the full article at Telegraph
Frustrated dictionary compilers challenged the public yesterday to help them in finding the first usage of some of the language’s most curious words and phrases. Lexicographers at the Oxford English Dictionary are trying to pin down the history of a list of 50 words and phrases, such as ‘boffin’, ‘codswallop’ and ‘mullet’, and to provide printed evidence of their earliest usage.
Read the full article at The Scotsman
For many Americans, both Indian and otherwise, the term “redskin” is a grotesque pejorative, a word that for centuries has been used to disparage and humiliate an entire people, but an exhaustive new study released today makes the case that it did not begin as an insult.
Read the full article at Washington Post
Ever needed that elusive word to describe a fear of having no beer? Or for a woman who looks pretty from the back but not the front? Help is at hand from a new book rounding up the world’s most specialised lexicon. “The Meaning of Tingo,” by British author Adam Jacot de Boinod, is somewhat of a labour of love, resulting from a year of solid trawling through 280 dictionaries and many dozens of Internet sites.
Read the full article at Yahoo!
Kamusi ya Kiswahili Sanifu (KKS – 2004) has a number of outstanding features. It brings into a single volume well over 23,000 headwords of the standard Kiswahili dialect. Most of the 2,000 new lexical items in the dictionary have been adopted from journalistic and literary registers especially poetry, prose and drama texts alongside usages originating from the print and electronic media in Kenya and Tanzania.
Read the full article at allAfrica
Seeking more street cred (n. popularity with or acceptance by the common people), Webster’s New World College Dictionary has added almost 80 new words and definitions, an update that reflects the nation’s current obsessions, from Al Qaeda and WMD on one hand to Botox and LASIK on the other.
Read the full article at South Florida
“Da Kine Dictionary,” some four years in the making, began hitting bookstore shelves several weeks ago. A successor of sorts to the “Pidgin To Da Max” series of the 1980s, the book contains about 360 Hawaiian pidgin words, their meaning, sentences using the words and, when relevant, word origins. They also include the names for those contributing each word, as well “wea an’ what yea dey wen grad” information.
Read the full article at The Honolulu Advertiser
Indian English, complete with misused words and made-up phrases, has made it to the Oxford Dictionary in a an entertaining revamp-review-renew ritual faultlessly observed by the single volume that is officially regarded as the linguistic equivalent of the US President’s State of the Union address.
Read the full article at The Times of India
No Comments - Add a comment