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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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When White House adviser Karl Rove broke the story of his resignation to the Wall Street Journal earlier this week, he denied that the timing had anything to do with pending Congressional investigations. “I’m not going to stay or leave based on whether it pleases the mob,” he insisted. Rove’s rather derisive use of the word mob raised some eyebrows in political quarters. Monica Hesse of the Washington Post wrote that mob is “a three-letter grenade of a word — so French Revolution, so frothy-mouthed peasants torching the streets.” The word is a clipped form of mobile, which in turn is shortened from the Latin expression mobile vulgus, meaning ‘the changeable common people, the fickle crowd.’ Though the word refers to the inconstancy of the multitude, the English-speaking masses have stayed pretty constant in their usage of mob. As I’m quoted in the Post article as saying, the core sense of mob hasn’t shifted much from its 17th-century origins, and that sense is almost always negative. (more…)

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When people consult a dictionary, they expect to find entries defining individual words, compounds made up of two or more words, and common multi-word phrases. But what about when a frequently occurring phrase or compound is used as a blueprint for generating new concoctions, with some parts kept constant and other parts swapped out? Last week I discussed some simple two-word “templates” that allow for creative choices in filling one slot, such as ___ chic, inner ___, and ___ rage. In such cases, lexicographers can make a note of a particularly productive usage in the entry for the word that is kept constant (like chic, inner, or rage). Things get a little more complicated when we consider longer phrases that follow a similar pattern of substitution. Traditional dictionary entries aren’t always well-equipped to describe this type of “phrase-hacking.” But one thing becomes quite obvious when looking at a large corpus of online texts (whether it’s the Oxford English Corpus or the rough-and-ready corpus of webpages indexed by Google or another search engine): writers are fiddling with phrasal templates all the time, revivifying expressions that may have become too formulaic or hackneyed. Of course, there’s always a lurking danger that the constant modification of a cliché may itself ultimately become a cliché!
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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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When carbon-neutral was named The New Oxford American Dictionary’s Word of the Year for 2006, the choice highlighted how recent efforts to combat climate change have brought forth a whole new class of carbon compounds (the lexical kind of compounds, not the chemical kind!). To be carbon-neutral, you can use a carbon calculator to estimate your household’s carbon footprint. Then you can seek to reduce your own carbon emissions, or you can purchase carbon offsets or carbon credits. Countries can institute carbon taxes, while eco-conscious companies can engage in carbon trading on the carbon market. And maybe someday, if we’re all low-carbon or even zero-carbon, we can live in a post-carbon world.

Putting aside the politics of the global warming debate, lexicographers are particularly interested in how the usage of the word carbon has been expanding in recent years. Not everyone is happy about the carbon boom. Salon’s advice columnist Cary Tennis recently fielded a letter from “Bothered by Bad Buzzwords,” who complained that carbon-neutral and related terms misuse the word carbon. “What I don’t understand is why no one is calling the concept correctly,” the letter-writer grumbled. “Carbon is not carbon dioxide! One is a black solid. One is an odorless, colorless gas. Couldn’t they call it CO₂ neutral?” (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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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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Last week for my inaugural column here at OUPblog I talked about how new words bubble up into the English lexicon and how Oxford lexicographers judge which ones deserve inclusion in new editions of our dictionaries. But we’re keeping tabs on many other more subtle aspects of our changing language beyond the flashy lexical newcomers. Take spelling errors, for instance. Dictionaries are, of course, expected to give the standard spellings of words and phrases, reflecting what is generally considered the most correct and acceptable in written English. But sometimes common misspellings tell us fascinating things about how writers navigate the tricky waters of English orthography. And sometimes once-nonstandard spellings become so widely accepted that they even (gasp) make it into the pages of the dictionary. (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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