What Is the Last Word in the Dictionary
December 2020
More than 500 new words, sub-entries, and revisions have been added to the Oxford English Dictionary in our latest update, including clockwork orange, follically challenged, and adulting.
Learn more about the words added to the OED this quarter in our (rather zhuzhy) new words notes by OED Revision Editor, Jonathan Dent.
And it's not just definitions that require updating—in this article, Deputy Chief Editor Philip Durkin highlights some notable OED entries with newly revised etymologies and variant forms, from those with clear origins such as bombshell, to those which threw up a few surprises, such as dragonfly.
As you hang your candy canes on your Christmas tree, take a moment to learn all about the revision of candy, and the word's connection to love stories, social events, and even bailiffs, in this blog post by OED Junior Editor, Kirsty Dunbar.
You can see the full list of words to be added in this update here.
September 2020
More than 650 new words, senses, and sub-entries have been added to the Oxford English Dictionary in our latest update, including code red, craftivist, and Cookie Monster.
Learn more about the words added to the OED this quarter in our release notes by OED Revision Editor, Jonathan Dent.
This month's update sees the publication of a number of new words from Canada. World English Editor, Danica Salazar, discusses schlockey and bush parties, buckle, and the May two-four in her notes on the Ontario Dialects Project here.
And if you have ever been curious about where the word codswallop came from, read about an investigation into its origins in this article by OED Revision Editor, Matthew Bladen.
You can see the full list of words to be added in this update here.
July 2020
Note from the OED Team
This is the second OED update to cover linguistic developments relating to the Covid-19 pandemic. Once again, this falls outside of our usual quarterly publication cycle, and once again these new and updated entries are being made available free to all at oed.com. As well as many new and newly familiar terms, we have also revised a number of relevant terms which were already in the OED but have assumed added meaning or significance in 2020. As a historical dictionary the OED has an obligation to tell the whole story of a word, but our constant monitoring of language also allows us to see (and tell) those stories as they emerge and change.
In preparing these entries, there is sometimes a balancing act in showing the linguistic impact of the last 6 months clearly and usefully, but also proportionately as part of the history of a word used over many decades or centuries. In some cases, we have chosen to update specific relevant senses rather than the whole entry.
The impact of Covid-19 on our lives and our language is an ongoing story. As we learn more about the nature of the virus and the social impact of the pandemic, the associated vocabulary changes, and the terms themselves change in meaning and usage. One advantage of publishing online is that we can update in response to such changes, so we've taken this opportunity to make a few updates to some of the entries we published in April. Covid-19 itself is a case in point: in April, OED followed medical literature then in defining it as a respiratory disease: it's now clear it's something more, and we've updated our definition accordingly. Our monitoring of large-scale text corpora also continues to identify words exhibiting a marked increase in usage, and a number of those appear in this update.
Because of the extraordinary circumstances of the pandemic, and the unusual pace of linguistic change, we have accelerated the process of researching, writing, and publishing these entries; but we've done that without compromising OED's usual editorial rigour, diligence, and impartiality. Like everyone else, lexicographers are adapting to changed circumstances, making the best of new constraints and difficulties. Working from home has benefits and disadvantages. Online research resources are largely unaffected, but library closures have left us temporarily unable to pursue or complete occasional strands of research or verification. However, in a period when so many of us have felt both the lack and the value of definitive information, OED's commitment to publishing new research remains constant.
Read our release notes from Trish Stewart, OED Revision Editor: Science here.
Learn how the OED has been tracking the development of the language around Covid-19 here.
You can see the full list of words added in this update here.
The OED publishes four updates a year. The next update will be added to the dictionary in September 2020.
June 2020
More than 400 new words, senses, and sub-entries have been added to the Oxford English Dictionary in our latest update, including banana bread, LOL, plant-based, and arr.
Read about the revision of spirit, n., "the most awkward, frustrating, and downright difficult entry I've ever worked on" in this article by OED Revision Editor, Matthew Bladen.
Learn more about the words added to the OED this quarter, and find out how to make yourself sound much more piratical, in our release notes by OED editor Jonathan Dent.
You can see the full list of words to be added in this update here.
April 2020
Note from Fiona McPherson, Editorial Manager, Public Liaison, OED Management
This is a significant update for the OED, and something of a departure, coming as it does outside our usual quarterly publication cycle. But these are extraordinary times, and OED lexicographers are in a unique position to track the development of the language we are using and to present the histories of these words.
Any new and widespread phenomenon always brings with it the development of new language to describe it. This particular crisis has brought a mixture of new coinages and the adaptation of terms that already existed to talk about the pandemic and the impact on the world. We've included some of the more widely-used terms in this update, informed and backed up by our analysis of corpora, including our own corpus of contemporary English, which currently contains over 8 billion words of data and is updated and expanded every month.
COVID-19 is, perhaps surprisingly, the only actual neologism. Coronavirus was first described in 1968 and was first included in the OED in 2008. The others are a mixture of words which had wider meaning and are now being used more specifically to refer to this pandemic, but what is clear, and what our analysis shows, is that in the first quarter of 2020, the use of all of these terms has seen a huge increase, and these words are all now entirely familiar and commonplace even if their histories are longer.
Read our release notes about this update by Executive Editor Bernadette Paton here.
You can see the full list of words to be added in this update here.
March 2020
More than 550 new words, senses, and sub-entries have been added to the Oxford English Dictionary in our latest update, including coulrophobia, there's one born every minute, and man hug.
This update seems to have a rather furry focus. Learn about beard-stroking, chin-stroking, puggles, and bears in our new word notes by OED New Words Editor, Craig Leyland.
Christmas has come early for those who love words just a little more than your average bear–learn all about the batch of Christmas words that have been worked on this quarter in our release notes by Matthew Bladen.
You can see the full list of words to be added in this update here.
January 2020
More than 550 new words, senses, and sub-entries have been added to the Oxford English Dictionary in our latest update, including mentionitis, awesomesauce, safe space, and shticky.
If you are running around like a chicken with its head cut off, take a moment to learn about the most Scottish word of all time, a new sense of UFO (which might please the knitting community), and why you might actually enjoy a dose of Jewish penicillin in our new words notes by Jonathan Dent, OED Senior Assistant Editor.
Learn how speakers of Nigerian English might use the words Mama put and K-leg, in this article by Danica Salazar, World English Editor for the OED, and find out more about our West African pronunciations in this explanatory note by our pronunciations team.
You can see the full list of words to be added in this update here.
What Is the Last Word in the Dictionary
Source: https://public.oed.com/updates/
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