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When a new edition of a dictionary is published, you never know what people are going to pick up on as noteworthy. Last week, when the sixth edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary was officially launched, much of the surrounding publicity had to do with the all the brand-new material: the 2,500 new words and phrases and 1,300 new illustrative quotes. But what’s gotten just as much attention is something that’s missing. The hyphen, that humble piece of connective punctuation, has been removed from about 16,000 compound words appearing in the text of the Shorter. The news has been making the rounds everywhere from the BBC to the Wall Street Journal. “Hyphens are the latest casualty of the internet age,” writes the Sydney Morning Herald. “Thousands of hyphens perish as English marches on,” a Reuters headline bleakly reads. A satirical paper even warns of a “hyphen-thief” on the loose. But don’t worry, hyphenophiles: the punctuation lives on, even if it’s entering uncertain terrain in the electronic era. (more…)

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Pentecost Island, Vanuatu

Coordinates: 15 42 S 168 10 E

Area: 190 square miles (492 sq. km)

Whether or not they should be classified as wholly fascinating or purely frightening, you’ve likely heard of skydiving, bridge jumping, and cliff diving. Less familiar may be the practice of land diving, a ritual performed by the men of Pentecost, one of a chain of about 80 volcanic islands that compose the Republic of Vanuatu. (more…)

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Today’s an exciting day for OUP, as we launch the sixth edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. If this were a birth announcement, we’d have to give the vitals: Oxford University Press joyfully announces the arrival of twin volumes, weighing a total of 13.6 pounds (6.2 kilograms), with 3,800 pages, 6 million words of text, more than half a million definitions, and 84,000 illustrative quotations. Welcome to the world, Shorter volumes 1 and 2! (Oh, and your diminutive friend too, the Shorter on CD-ROM.) (more…)

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Ben’s column this week looks at the fascinating history of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. He explains how the OED, quite possibly OUP’s most important book (well, series of books), got trimmed to a manageable two volumes and why this development was important. Enjoy!

In 1902, a fellow named William Little took on the task of making a “shorter” version of the monumental Oxford English Dictionary. When it was finally published in 1933 (more than a decade after Little’s death), the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary took up two thick volumes totalling 2,500 pages. Still, the abridgment proved to be a more convenient (and more affordable) alternative to the massive OED. This month sees the publication of the sixth edition of the Shorter, and the two volumes now span more than 3,700 pages, packed with more than half a million definitions covering ten centuries of English. Little’s dictionary, it turns out, is far from little. And despite its name, it’s not getting any shorter! (more…)

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Sark, United Kingdom

Coordinates: 49 25 N 2 22 W

Approximate area: 2 square miles (5 sq km)

Times change, and with them, people and places are carried along on the tide of modernization. But not always. On the tiny island of Sark in the English Channel, feudalism has clung, virtually unnoticed, to its rocky shores since the Middle Ages. In fact, this hereditary form of rule hung on long enough to make it the only feudal territory left on Europe, a continent known (among political geographers at least) for its microstates and puny principalities. (more…)

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What’s your favorite word? On Wordie.org, a website launched last year by John McGrath, you can post lists of “words you love, words you hate, whatever.” So far, about 4,800 users (”Wordies”) have posted a total of 264,000 words, 90,000 of which are unique. In this efflorescence of logophilia, what word strikes the fancy of the most Wordies? Topping the list of the “most wordied” words is schadenfreude, submitted by 250 users. This German loanword, defined by the New Oxford American Dictionary as “pleasure derived by someone from another person’s misfortune,” easily outpaces runners-up like quixotic, serendipity, loquacious, and plethora. (If defenestrate and defenestration joined forces, that handy term for throwing someone out a window would come in a close second.) What does it say about Web-savvy language lovers that the word they find most notable describes malicious mirth in the misery of others? Are we all just a bunch of sadists?
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Gog and Magog

Everybody can probably rattle off a religious myth, or name an urban myth or two, but what about those of the cartographical variety? They aren’t so common anymore, and yet for centuries much of what was known about the world was little more than the figment of a mapmaker’s imagination. From about the seventh century, European maps went so far as to locate Paradise on the eastern edge of Asia, surrounded by a wall of flame, or later, simply water. (more…)

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In “The Grammarian’s Five Daughters,” a fable by science fiction writer Eleanor Arnason, a mother bestows grammatical gifts to five daughters seeking their fortune in the world. The eldest daughter gets a bag full of nouns, the next gets verbs, the next adjectives, and the next adverbs. The youngest daughter is stuck with the leftovers, those “dull little words” overlooked by everyone else: the prepositions. But the prepositions ultimately bring order to a chaotic land, serving as the foundation for a strong and thriving nation organized under the motto “WITH.”
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Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn

Coordinates: 40 41 N 73 59 W

Approximate length of tunnel: 2,000 feet (610 meters)

Examples abound of cities built on top of cities and newspapers frequently report on accidental discoveries made by construction crews digging new foundations around the world. And while they may be more common in Europe where dense populations have concentrated for many centuries, other instances exist. Nearly 30 years ago, a young engineering student discovered a forgotten train tunnel that once ran from Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill neighborhood to the East River waterfront, connecting with a busy ferry link to Manhattan. (more…)

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One question I often field in my capacity as OUP’s editor for American dictionaries is, “What’s the longest word in the dictionary?” I don’t hear it as often as “How do I get a new word in the dictionary?” but it still comes up from time to time. My stock answer isn’t very interesting: “It depends on what counts as a ‘word,’ and it depends on the dictionary.” That answer doesn’t satisfy most people, since the follow-up question is typically something like, “No, really, is it antidisestablishmentarianism or supercalifragilisticexpialidocious?” Those two specimens are the “usual suspects” that get hauled out in discussions of the longest word in English, perhaps because most of us have been familiar with them since grade school. But there are many other worthy candidates for the “longest word” mantle.

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Meteor Crater, Arizona

Coordinates: 35 3 N 111 2 W

Diameter: 4,150 feet (1,265 m)

Each summer, movie screens nationwide (and increasingly world wide for that matter) are crowded with blockbuster flicks pitting man against other men, nature, and often alien life forms. Well, I think most people are pretty good at distinguishing science fiction from reality, but the truth is, planet Earth does get visitors from outer space every once in a while. Evidence of these occurrences is limited, but hard to miss. Take Arizona’s Meteor Crater for example. (more…)

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Erin McKean, who is OUP’s chief consulting editor for American dictionaries when she’s not busy being “America’s lexicographical sweetheart,” filled in this past Sunday for a vacationing William Safire, devoting the New York Times Magazine’s “On Language” column to a subject that should be familiar to readers of this column: the Oxford English Corpus and the fascinating things that it tells us about our changing language. (more…)

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Lake Baikal, Russia

Coordinates: 53 0 N 108 0 E

Total area: 12,160 square miles (31,494 sq km)

Overshadowed by its more immodestly-named North American cousins the Great Lakes, Russia’s Ozero Baykal, or Lake Baikal, is no less a remarkable expanse of water itself. At 5,714 feet (1,743 m), the deepest lake also happens to be the oldest freshwater body on the planet. (more…)

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As we here at Oxford try to keep track of the torrent of new words entering the English language, we notice certain peculiar patterns developing. One of the most popular methods of forming a new word these days is by fusing the parts of existing ones like Frankenstein’s monster. The two winners in the “New Word Open Mic” I mentioned a few weeks ago are good examples of this blending process in action: hangry is a blend of hungry and angry, while newsrotica blends news and erotica. Sometimes a piece of a word can get downright gregarious, uniting with a whole slew of fellow members of the lexicon. Juice manufacturers rely on us to recognize that the cran- of cranberry can mix it up with other fruit names to form cran-raspberry, cran-strawberry, cran-grape, cran-apple, cran-pineapple, and so forth. And the fast food industry has inundated us with all manner of burgers since the original hamburger, like turkeyburger, chickenburger, baconburger, steakburger, and veggieburger. (Of course, it was inevitable that someone had to come up with the cranburger.) (more…)

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Huiricuta Ecological and Cultural Protected Area, Mexico

Coordinates: 23 42 N 100 54 W

Approximate Area: 285 sq. miles (738 sq. km)

Pilgrimages have long been a part of religious practice for many faiths around the world, and while the purpose and destination of each journey is predictably quite different, a common element among them all seems to be distance. In the case of the Huichol people of western Mexico, their route spans roughly 400 miles to a sacred mountain at the southern limits of the Chihuahuan Desert. (more…)

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In our last installment, I noted that the increasingly common spelling of minuscule as miniscule is not just your average typographical error: it makes sense in a new way, since the respelling brings the word into line with miniature, minimum, and a whole host of tiny terms using the mini- prefix. It might not be correct from an etymological standpoint, since the original word is historically related to minus instead of mini-, but most users of English don’t walk around with accurate, in-depth etymologies in their heads. (Sorry, Anatoly!) Rather, we’re constantly remaking the language by using the tools at our disposal, very often by comparing words and phrases to other ones we already know. If something in the lexicon seems a bit murky, we may try to make it clearer by bringing it into line with our familiar vocabulary. This is especially true with idioms, those quirky expressions that linger in the language despite not making much sense on a word-by-word basis. (more…)

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Andorra

Coordinates: 42 30 N 1 30 E

Population: 71,822 (2007 est.)

If you’re one of a handful of extant micro-states, lacking in natural resources, arable land, or even a sizable labor force, what do you do for money? Well, in the case of the tiny Principality of Andorra, wedged between Spain and France in the Pyrenees Mountains, building resorts seemed to be the best option available. (more…)

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Rebecca OUP-US

Today we are proud to present Ben Zimmer’s first installment in his new column, From A To Zimmer. To read more about the column click here.

When I told friends that I was taking a job as editor for American dictionaries at Oxford University Press, I started getting emails asking, “So how do I get a word in the dictionary?” One college friend, who’s now a pediatrics professor researching the effects of smoking on children, had a specific term that he thought deserved recognition: thirdhand smoke, used to refer to residual tobacco smoke contamination that lingers after a cigarette is extinguished. I had never heard of thirdhand smoke, but it turns out it’s gotten some press attention due to recent research indicating what a serious danger smoke residue poses to infants. (more…)

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Rebecca OUP-US

Today is an exciting day at the OUPblog. We are gearing up to launch our newest column which will appear for the first time tomorrow. Casper Grathwohl, Reference Publisher for OUP-USA and the Academic Division in Oxford, has graciously agreed to be the “opening-act” and introduce the impetuous behind our newest column. Check out what Casper has to say below. Be sure to come back tomorrow and read From A To Zimmer!

Earlier this year Oxford introduced a new look to its dictionaries—a “refresh” of our classic design. One of the new elements you’ll notice is a little logo on the cover of every dictionary with the words “Powered by the Oxford Corpus” next to it. Intriguing. Most people have probably never heard of a corpus. So why are we making such a big deal of it? Well, the story of the Oxford English Corpus sits at the heart of our ability to track language and reflect real language usage—by real speakers—in our dictionaries. (more…)

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As American as______? What would you fill the blank in with? Ronald McDonald, Uncle Ben, Aunt Jemima, Betty Crocker or someone we didn’t mention? Who do you think is the quintessential culinary icon that never lived? Below Andrew Smith, editor of The Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink gives us some history behind these American icons. Please let us know in the comments who you favorite is! Be sure to check back on Thursdays throughout May for more great posts by Andrew Smith who teaches culinary history and professional food writing at The New School University, serves as Chair of the Culinary Trust and as a consultant to several food television productions.

A. Ronald McDonald
In 1963 a Washington, DC McDonald’s franchise invented the Ronald McDonald icon. Ronald McDonald appeared on national advertisements beginning in 1965 and the following year, Ronald McDonald became McDonald’s official spokesman. (more…)

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