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A state run bookstore in Shanghai is ripping out pages from Webster’s Dictionary that include a reference to Taiwan. The Dallas Morning News checks in with Deep Vellum Books, the bookstore offshoot of Deep Vellum Publishing that owner Will Evans sought a business partner to keep going. Local news in Madison, Connecticut goes inside twenty-six-year-old […]
...moreThe Oxford English Dictionary is doing its part to celebrate Roald Dahl’s 100th birthday by including some of his most memorable made-up words in the new edition, according to the Guardian: Michael Proffitt, chief editor of the OED, said: “The inclusion in OED of a number of words coined by or associated with Roald Dahl reflects […]
...moreFollowing a viral Twitter interaction about whether the dictionary is adapting too much to new trends in language, Merriam-Webster reassures everyone that language changes over time, and that’s okay.
...moreI do not think it means what you think it means: Do words mean what the dictionary says they mean, or do they gain meaning through the way we use them? Any person without an agenda knows the answer is “both.”
...moreWe need to know that the dictionary, as an institution, has a cultural power beyond the sum of its parts…And that does carry with it a responsibility to realize that we exist within that tension, and to not always hide behind the idea of descriptivist lexicography Over at the New Yorker, Nora Caplan-Bricker compiles stories […]
...moreA Twitter storm over sexism within the Oxford Dictionary has lead its publisher, Oxford University Press, to reconsider how it selects example sentences, reports the Guardian. The dictionary includes sentences to explain usage of words, but researchers found that the book often gendered professions and provided sexist views. Buzzfeed highlighted many of the worst examples, fueling […]
...moreThe Oxford English Dictionary, the first comprehensive catalog of the English language, took seventy years to compile. Volunteers aided the project, and one of the biggest contributors happened to be a murderer who lived in an insane asylum: Through the years, the OED’s editor had enlisted hundreds of volunteers around the English-speaking world, and probably […]
...moreBritish designer Jez Burrows was looking up a word in the New Oxford American Dictionary and was struck by how literary the example sentences for word definitions were. So he created a new Tumblr called Dictionary Stories, where he posts very short stories made up only of those sentences: He perched on the edge of […]
...moreThis year in the decline of the English language, Dictionary.com has added words like “slacktivism,” “lifehack,” and “basic,” according to the Dictionary.com blog. On the positive side, they finally added definitions for gender-inclusive words like “agender,” “bigender,” and “gender-fluid,” and that is a step in the right direction.
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