Tag Archives: oed

Fowler in the OED at last!

Posted on October 4, 2018 by Ingrid Tieken

I’ve been at it at least since 2011, but Fowler has finally been given an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary. And not just as a noun (n2, to be precise), but the adjectives Fowlereque and Fowlerian are included as well … Continue reading →

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A postdating for the OED – with thanks to Kingsley Amis

Posted on August 10, 2017 by Ingrid Tieken

What other words are there for stickler, pedant or pundit, Lonneke van Leest-Kootkar asked in a blogpost last year. Rebecca Gowers, in Horrible Words (2016), chose to use the word griper instead of stickler (a word I will always associate with Lynne Truss). … Continue reading →

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A missing word?

Posted on June 30, 2017 by adrianstenton

I was copy-editing a paper for a language journal today, and came across this: “… children may or may not identify phonemes better audiovisually than auditory only.” The prescriptivist in me baulked at the combination of adverb and adjective, and … Continue reading →

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Dahlesque got in, so how about Fowleresque?

Posted on September 29, 2016 by Ingrid Tieken

Two weeks ago, NRC-Handelsblad published an article on the memorable fact that among their new entries, the Oxford English Dictionary adopted words made up by Roald Dahl (1916-1990). The OED as a news item in a Dutch quality newspaper! The occasion appears … Continue reading →

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The term “usage guide”

Posted on April 21, 2015 by Ingrid Tieken

Within the Bridging the Unbridgeable project we use the term “usage guide” to describe usage handbooks of manuals like Fowler’s Modern English Usage and many others, as included in our HUGE database. But where does the term come from? I checked … Continue reading →

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Onto doesn’t exist?

Posted on March 23, 2015 by Robin Straaijer

Last week, Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade published a post on Simon Heffer’s discussion of into on this blog. In his discussion of into in Strictly English, Heffer mentions a closely related usage item, the use of on to versus onto, of which … Continue reading →

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No it didn’t: heighth as a usage problem

Posted on February 25, 2015 by Ingrid Tieken

Last week, the book Transatlantic Perspectives on Late Modern English came out, edited by Marina Dossena. It includes two papers that are of interest to this project, one by Ulrich Busse, which deals with the usage guides by Alford (1864) and White … Continue reading →

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A vintage copy of the Concise Oxford Dictionary

Posted on October 14, 2014 by Ingrid Tieken

I always thought this is what the COD looked like: Until yesterday, when I found a lovely, what might be described as a vintage copy of the book on the Free Books Table we have on the second floor of … Continue reading →

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The Correct and Improving Major Byron F. Caws

Posted on April 17, 2014 by Ingrid Tieken

This is Richard Bond’s second blog post. The Story So Far – At Dr. Johnson’s House in London there is a plaque that reads “Castigavit et emendavit” (“he corrected and improved“) suggesting that these are H. W. Fowler’s words in recognition … Continue reading →

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Some words are(n’t) better than others

Posted on February 4, 2014 by Morana Lukač

Michael Proffitt, the new Chief Editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, was recently interviewed by CNN’s Christiane Amanpour (see video here) commenting on the place of the largest English dictionary in the modern age. Although the O.E.D. was one of … Continue reading →

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