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By Michelle Rafferty

127 years ago today the Oxford English Dictionary published its first volume (A to ANT), so I thought I’d pay tribute with the story of how I recently learned the word “shibboleth”:

While rubbing elbows with fancy people at the recent OED re-launch party, I had the chance to meet contributors Matt Kohl and Katherine Connor Martin. Naturally the topic of conversation came to words, and I brought up one I had been using a lot lately: frak (the fictional version of “fuck” on Battlestar Galactica). I explained that I just started watching the show (better late than never, no?) and had been testing “frak” out in conversation to pick up other fans. Matt said, oh that’s a “shibboleth.”

A whateth? According to the OED:

The Hebrew word used by Jephthah as a test-word by which to distinguish the fleeing Ephraimites (who could not pronounce the sh) from his own men the Gileadites (Judges xii. 4–6).

Matt told me that he had first heard the word on The West Wing. Martin Sheen sums it up nicely: a password. A more recent sense in the OED defines shibboleth as:

A catchword or formula adopted by a party or sect, by which their adherents or followers may be discerned, or those not their followers may be excluded.

The sect, in my case, is  Battlestar enthusiasts. I e-mailed Katherine later for more examples. She said:

I think politics affords some good examples. The pro-life movement is distinguishable by its use of certain buzz-words (abortionist, abortion-doctor, etc.), and the pro-choice movement by terms like “anti-choice”. Republicans use the word “democrat” as an adjective, while Democrats use the adjective “democratic”. If you ever hear someone talk about the “Democrat Party” on cable TV, you can be sure s/he is a conservative.

Shibboleth, it’s frakking everywhere!

(Thank you to Matt and Katherine for your countless hours spent keeping the OED alive, and for helping me realize the educational value of my addiction.)

"Let's get he frak outta here!" -Kara Thrace, S4E7

Jimmy Fallon, 'Glee' and Betty White (made for an "energetically hilarious" start to last night's Emmys. As for the rest of the show? Critics at USA Today and the New York Times, reg. required, gave the former SNL star mixed reviews. Plus... Read the rest of this post

Here at Oxford, we love words. We love when they have ancient histories, we love when they have double-meanings, we love when they appear in alphabet soup, and we love when they are made up.

Last week on The Sean Hannity Show, Sarah Palin pushed for the Barack and Michelle Obama to refudiate the NAACP’s claim that the Tea Party movement harbors “racist elements.” (You can still watch the clip on Mediaite and further commentary at CNN.) Refudiate is not a recognized word in the English language, but a curious mix of repudiate and refute. But rather than shrug off the verbal faux pas and take more care in the future, Palin used it again in a tweet this past Sunday.

Note: This tweet has been since deleted and replaced by this one.

Later in the day, Palin responded to the backlash from bloggers and fellow Twitter users with this:

Whether Palin’s word blend was a subconscious stroke of genius, or just a slip of the tongue,  it seems to have made a critic out of everyone. (See: #ShakesPalin) Lexicographers sure aren’t staying silent. Peter Sokolowksi of Merriam-Webster wonders, “What shall we call this? The Palin-drome?” And OUP lexicographer Christine Lindberg comments thus:

The err-sat political illuminary Sarah Palin is a notional treasure. And so adornable, too. I wish you liberals would wake up and smell the mooseburgers. Refudiate this, word snobs! Not only do I understand Ms. Palin’s message to our great land, I overstand it. Let us not be countermindful of the paths of freedom stricken by our Founding Fathers, lest we forget the midnight ride of Sam Revere through the streets of Philadelphia, shouting “The British our coming!” Thank the God above that a true patriot voice lives on today in Sarah Palin, who endares to live by the immorternal words of Nathan Henry, “I regret that I have but one language to mangle for my country.”

Mark Liberman over at Language Log asks, “If she really thought that refudiate was Shakespearean, wouldn’t she have left the original tweet proudly in place?”

He also points out that Palin did not coin the refudiate word blend. In fact, he says, “A

By Anatoly Liberman

Neologists, thesauruses, and etymology. A month ago, one of our correspondents asked what we call people who coin new words. I suggested that such wordsmiths or wordmen may be called neologists. My spellchecker did not like this idea and offered geologist or enologist for neologist, but I did not listen to its advice. Geologists study rocks, and (o)enologists are experts in wine making. Mountains and alcohol are for the young; I have enough trouble keeping my identity among entomologists (the motif of an insect will turn up again at the end of this post). Soon after my answer was posted, a letter came from Marc Alexander, a colleague teaching in Glasgow. He was a member of the team that produced the great Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (this is only part of the title) that Oxford University Press brought out in 2009. He kindly looked up the relevant category in the thesaurus and found the following: logodaedalus (current between 1641 and 1690), logodaedalist (it lived in books between 1721-1806), neologist (which surfaced in 1785 and is still alive), neoterist, and verbarian, coined in 1785 and 1873 respectively, all in all a nice gallery of stillborn freaks. Mr. Alexander adds: “Based on OED citations, neologist is, I think, exclusively one who uses rather one who coins [new words].”

I would like to profit by this opportunity and thank all our readers who comment on my posts (I wish there were more of them) and in addition say something about the role of thesauruses for etymology. When the first volumes of the OED, at that time called NED (New English Dictionary) reached the public, two attitudes clashed, and the polemic was carried out with the acerbity typical of such exchanges in the 18th and the 19th century. (Those who have never read newspapers and popular and semi-popular magazines published in Addison’s days and much later have no idea how virulent their style often was. Both James A.H. Murray and Walter W. Skeat represented the trend in an exemplary way and never missed the chance of calling their opponents benighted, ludicrously uninformed, and unworthy of even the shortest rejoinder; then a long diatribe would usually follow.) Some people praised Murray for including all the words that occurred in printed sources, while others objected to filling the pages of the great national dictionary with obstructive rubbish: they would never have allowed logodaedalist and its likes to mar the pages of a serious reference book. No convincing arguments for or against either position exist. The public will not notice the presence of logodaedalist or use this preposterous word, but those who are interested in the sources of human creativity, for whom language history is not only a list of survivors (be it sounds, forms, syntactic constructions, or words) but a chronicle of battles won and lost will be perennially grateful to the OED for documenting even the words that lived briefly. Such words show how English-speakers have tried to master their language for more than a millennium, and the picture is inspiring from beginning to end.

Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary… (two handsome volumes) is a great book, a monumental achievement, a truly bright feather in OUP’s cap. It will serve as an inestimable tool in etymological work. When we ask the often unanswerable question about the connection between what seems to be an arbitrary group of sounds (“sign”) and meaning, sometimes our only guide or supporting evidence is analogy. I will use a typical example from my work. The origin of basket (from C

J.R.R. Tolkien’s first job was as an assistant on the staff of the OED, and he later said that he had ‘learned more in those two years than in any other equal period of [his] life.’ In The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary, three senior OED editors – Peter Gilliver, Jeremy Marshall, and Edmund Weiner – explore more than 100 words found in Tolkien’s fiction, such as ‘hobbit’, ‘attercop’, and ‘precious’. Edmund Weiner has written this original post for OUPblog on Winterfilth (October) and Blotmath (November).

As I write this blog Winterfilth is coming to an end and Blotmath is about to begin. What on earth am I talking about? Well, as the Tolkien enthusiasts out there will know, these are the names that the hobbits used for October and November.

As it happens, although the action of The Lord of the Rings spans October and November (avid readers will remember that a lot of action happens in the one and the other is spent by the hobbits resting in Rivendell), these month names are not used in the story. They are given in an appendix in which Tolkien explains the calendar of the Shire (the land of the hobbits) and the hobbits’ names for the days of the week and the months.

Did Tolkien make these names up? No. Some people will be surprised to learn that he made up none of his ‘English’ words, as opposed to the words of the elvish, dwarvish, and orkish languages. (The one exception, funnily enough, may be the word ‘hobbit’—but the jury on that is still out.) The other strange and archaic-looking words, such as mathom, Arkenstone, eleventy, flet, and barrow-wight, are all based on earlier usage and generally go back either to Anglo-Saxon (Old English, English before the Norman Conquest) or to Old Norse (the language of the Vikings and Sagas).

So what about the months? Tolkien borrowed them for the hobbits from Anglo-Saxon texts that give both the Latin names of the months (the names we use now) and their Old English equivalents. None of the latter seem to have survived the Conquest except (in a different meaning) Yule, and Lide, a now obsolete dialect word for March, which may have meant ‘loud’ (referring to its windiness). Blotmath, or rather Blotmonath or Blodmonath, was the time when in pagan times cattle were sacrificed (blotan ‘sacrifice’ or blod ‘blood’).

And Winterfilth? In Old English this was Winterfylleth, in which fylleth means ‘fulness’, or perhaps ‘full moon’. The word for ‘filth’ was spelt and pronounced differently, but in modern English they would have come to sound the same, and this gave Tolkien an opportunity for one of the scholarly etymological puns to which he was very partial.

Lauren, Publicity Assistant

It’s sad, but true. Historical Thesaurus week has come to an end. We feel like we’ve read it cover to cover (to cover to cover) and it’s hard to let go. And so, I’d like to leave you with a valuable lesson I learned: how to use the HTOED to call someone “stupid” in Old English. In this video post, Judy Pearsall (OUP’s Reference Publishing Manager) discusses how words are connected to one another in a HTOED entry, using the example of “foolish person.” Watch the video after the jump.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Lauren, Publicity Assistant

Ammon Shea is a vocabularian, lexicographer, and the author of Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages. In the videos below, he discusses the evolution of terms like “Love Affair” and names of diseases, as traced in the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, demonstrating how language changes and reflects cultural histories. Shea also dives into the HTOED to talk about the longest entry, interesting word connections, and comes up with a few surprises. (Do you know what a “strumpetocracy” is?) Watch both videos after the jump. Be sure to check back all week to learn more about the HTOED.

Love, Pregnancy, and Venereal Disease in the Historical Thesaurus

Click here to view the embedded video.

Inside the Historical Thesaurus

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Professor Christian Kay joined the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary project in 1969, working on it right up to publication this month. In this original post, she reflects on the successes and challenges of forty years’ work on this amazing feat of scholarship.

Click here to read more OUPblog posts on the HTOED.

Publication of the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (HTOED) took place on 22nd October 2009. It was celebrated by a party at Glasgow University, where the project was developed, attended by over 100 people. I was proud to be one of them.

The project was started in 1965 by Professor M. L. Samuels, who, at the age of 89, was present at the party and gave a short talk. Also on the platform was another founder member, Professor Jane Roberts, who supplemented our Oxford English Dictionary-based data with material from Old English (c700 to 1150 AD) not included in the OED. The quartet of editors was completed by Irené Wotherspoon and myself, both of whom joined the project in 1969, as Research Assistants funded by the Leverhulme Trust. By that time, Irené was completing the first postgraduate thesis based on Historical Thesaurus materials, A Notional Classification of Two Parts of English Lexis.

The appointment of Irené and myself was a significant departure for the project in that it was an acknowledgment that it would never be completed without full-time assistance – originally it had been conceived as a research activity for teaching staff and graduate students. We settled down with our volumes of the OED and our packets of paper slips to compile data for inclusion in the thesaurus. My first letter was L, which contains some very challenging words, such as ‘lay’ and ‘lie’, whose meanings I had to distribute around the semantic categories of the work.

The 1970’s brought other challenges. Michael Samuels and I started working on a system of classification suited to large amounts of historical data, and we began recruiting doctoral students to work on specific sections of data, such as Religion or Goodness. We also faced a situation which was to become horribly familiar: running out of money. My job became part-time, and I supplemented my income by freelance work for publishers and writing textbooks. The situation was saved for me in 1979, when I became a full-time lecturer in the English Language Department. Irené had already departed for the south of England, where she raised three children and continued to work freelance for HTOED.

The downside of having a more secure job (‘at last’, said my family) was having less time for project work. In addition to my new role as a teacher, I found myself increasingly involved with thesaurus administration. We took our first tentative steps into computing at the urging of OUP, who wanted the project delivered electronically, and I spent much time in mutually uncomprehending discussions with computing experts. I also developed skills in fund-raising and people management: in the 1980’s we began to take on trainee lexicographers and typists to do preliminary classification and data entry. When Professor Samuels retired in 1989, I took over the administration completely.

The ever-present question, asked repeatedly by funders, University authorities, and OUP, was “When will the project be finished?” This was a difficult question to answer, and involved such arcane skills as calculating the number of slips to a filing drawer, multiplying by the number of drawers, and working out the percentage completed in relation to the total in the OED. We came close to finishing in the early 1980’s, when we completed slip-making for the first edition of the OED, but by that time OUP had started producing supplements, and then a second edition, so we ploughed on, combining slip-making with classification. For the remaining years of the project, funding became easier, and we were able to employ both full-time assistants and graduate students on a part-time basis. Overall, I calculate that about 230 people played an active part in the project during its 44-year history.

Over the past few weeks, various people (mainly journalists) have asked me “Why did it take so long?” The answer is partly that we never had enough money, but also that work of this kind requires a good deal of careful human input. If you are faced with, say, 10,000 slips containing words which have something to do with Food or Music, arriving at an acceptable classification is not the work of a few hours.

Classification and data entry proceeded through the 1990’s and early 2000’s, with glimmers of light occasionally visible at the end of the tunnel. One highlight of this period was the publication in 1995 of A Thesaurus of Old English by Jane Roberts and myself, which proved that we could at least finish something. Another was my promotion to a professorship in 1996. However, the best moment of all came on 29th September 2008, when the disk containing the final text went off to OUP, followed in August 2009, after a tough period of proofreading, by the appearance in Glasgow of the first copy of HTOED.

By Kirsty McHugh, OUP UK
Today sees the long-awaited publication of The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. Conceived and compiled by the English Language Department of the University of Glasgow, and based on the Oxford English Dictionary, it is the result of 44 years of scholarly labour. The HTOED is a groundbreaking analysis of the historical inventory of English, allowing users to find words connected in meaning throughout the history of the language in a way that has never before been possible.

Kicking off some wonderful posts on the HTOED, here are some fun facts and figures about this incredible work.  Be sure to check back all week to learn more!

* At just under 4,000 pages, the HTOED is the largest thesaurus in the world. It covers approximately 800,000 word meanings from Old English to the present day.

* The HTOED provides a breadth of knowledge that is found in no other work, and has more synonyms than any other thesaurus. The word immediately, for example, has 265 synonyms, ranging from ædre, which is only found in Old English, to yesterday, which is first recorded as being used in the sense of immediately in 1974.

* It uses an entirely new thematic system of classification, with a detailed meaning structure that distinguishes between true synonyms and closely related words.

* There are approximately 800,000 meanings within the HTOED

* The largest category in the HTOED is “immediately” with 265 meanings

* The HTOED took 44 years to complete (started in 1965, published in 2009)

* In total, 230 people have worked on the project

* It’s taken approximately 320,000 hours to complete the HTOED – that’s the equivalent of 176 years

* The project has cost approximately £1.1million ($1.8million) – roughly 75p ($1.25) per meaning

* The project faced its most significant challenge in 1978 when the building the project was housed in caught fire. The entire archive of paper slips that were used to record each entry were very nearly destroyed. They were only saved because they were in boxes inside metal filing cabinets.

* During the 1980s the Old English material was entered into electronic databases developed in London. The UK government sponsored a programme to train people in editing and data entry skills. The trainees helped to edit and input the bulk of the HTOED data into an electronic system.

* With financial straits being an ever-present backdrop, one team-member, perhaps with excessive zeal, worked out how many pages of the OED could be recorded by a slip-maker within the lifetime of a single pencil (answer: 130)

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This is a special podictionary episode in which I interview Philip Durkin, the Principal Etymologist for The Oxford English Dictionary.

I contacted Dr. Durkin because his book The Oxford Guide to Etymology was recently released in North America and he was kind enough to spend a comfortable 20 minutes talking with me.

Podictionary often concentrates on the changes in meaning that a word goes through over time so when we talked we discussed the other side of etymology—changes in word form.

Dr. Durkin explained some of the tools of etymology as well as talked specifically about the etymologies of the words friar and penguin.

At the moment there is no transcript available of this interview but I encourage you to listen either by clicking the “download” link above or via the website audio player.

Lauren, Publicity Assistant

Jesse Sheidlower is Editor at Large of the Oxford English Dictionary and author of The F-Word. Recognized as one of the foremost authorities on obscenity in English, he has written about language for a great many publications, including a recent article on Slate. Here, Jesse discusses the criteria for including certain words or obscenities in dictionaries.  Watch the video after the jump.

WARNING: This video contains explicit language.

Click here to view the embedded video.