In the latest quarterly update to the Oxford English Dictionary, one entry in particular has attracted attention: tweet, previously defined only as the chirping of birds, has been expanded to refer to 140-character Twitter updates as well. The OED loosened its usual "ten year rule" to let this newcomer in.Continue reading...
Kudos to New York Times "Big City" columnist Gina Bellafante for invoking an ancient "-claim" when she referred to Dorothy Rabinowitz's deununciations of the Citi Bike bike-sharing program in New York as "declaimed absurdities."Continue reading...
Today, we add a new dimension to the word-learner's resources in our Dictionary: a "word forms" section of the page where you can see how a word's spelling or pronunciation varies.Continue reading...
"There are some old words," explains Arika Okrent on Mental Floss, "that are nearly obsolete but we still recognize because they were lucky enough to get stuck in set phrases that have lasted across the centuries." Okrent lists a dozen "lucky words that survived by getting fossilized in idioms."Continue reading...