#oxford english dictionary

[a-word-a-day-for-writers]

𝐀𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐚𝐥

uh-NEEL

1. To set on fire, kindle, inflame, lit. and fig.   

2. To subject to the action of fire; to alter in any way with heat; as, to ‘fire’ or bake earthenware, fure ores, vitrify or glaze a surface 

3. To burn in colours upon glass, earthenware, or metal, to enamel by encaustic process. arch.

4. a. To toughen anything, made brittle from the action of fire, by exposure to continuous and slowly diminished heat, or by other equivalent process 

b. loosely, To cool down from a great heat  

c. transf. Applied to the action of frost. rare. 

5. fig. To toughen, temper 

6. Microbiology. To combine to form double-stranded nucleic acid

[uwmspeccoll]

It’s Fine Press Friday!

In the spirit of Christmas’s arrival in three days, we present a small Christmas-themed book entitled An Alphabet of Christmas Words, published in 1966. The book is a dictionary of holiday terms, with corresponding illustrations. Entries were selected and edited from the Oxford English Dictionary by American writer Helen McKelvey Oakley (1906-2003), who explains that her “interest [in this project] lies in seeing how The Dictionary treats [each term].” The accompanying illustrations are by Ursula Suess (b. 1924), a graphic designer, calligrapher, and artist. Most recently, her art was shown in a 2022 solo exhibition at the Tubac Center of the Arts in Tubac, Arizona.

An Alphabet of Christmas Words was offset printed in Times Roman on Mohawk Superfine Text paper by Hallmark Lithographers Inc. in an edition of 360 copies, published by the Oxford University Press and designed by Ursula Suess and the press's art director and vice president John Begg (1903-1974). Also included with this book are two small season’s greetings cards from the press; one has Begg’s name printed on it and the other has “from Ursel and Mutti” inscribed in black ink.

View more Fine Press Friday Posts.

– Sarah S., Special Collections Graduate Intern

[ramblingsfromthytruly]

current mood: replacing scrolling with reading the oxford dictionary and it's kinda fun???

[solarishashernoseinabook]

[Video description: A panning shot of five dictionaries on a table. The video moves on after a bit to a shot of the Compact Oxford English dictionary, a two-volume dictionary in a slipcase. A person opens the dictionary, moving a grey cat out of the way gently, and opens a drawer on the slipcase to show where a magnifying glass would normally fit. /end]

[demi-shoggoth]

2024 Reading Log, pt 6

26. Future Humans by Scott Solomon. This little book is about the possibilities for human evolution; what we know about how humans have evolved in the modern era, and what future human evolution could look like. The first chapter honestly surprised me, since it was about setting the table for the concept, which is seen as radical by a surprisingly high number of established biologists, that humans are still evolving at all. And then the book talks about genomic analyses, the influence on genetic drift, gene flow, natural selection, sexual selection and mutation rates on human evolution, and how we know what we know. The book is overall good, but I do have a few quibbles. Considering how well the content about natural selection highlights the differing access to health care and birth control between developed nations and the rest of the world is, I wish that it talked about how different cultures have different expectations as for what is sexy, rather than lumping all human attraction into “symmetrical faces and tall men”. And like a lot of books about human evolution, behavior and how they are linked, I wish it remembered that queer people exist.

27. Sad Animal Facts by Brooke Barker. This is a quick little book, in which cartoony drawings of animals are paired with information about their natural histories that are sad or upsetting, especially from a human standpoint. The cover shows you a sample joke, and they’re basically all like this. The appendix is more context behind each of the one-liners, which I do appreciate. I had an enjoyable… fifteen minutes with this book. It was fine, but I don’t think I’d spend money on it.

28. Unruly by David Mitchell. This is a comedy/history book about English royalty, from when England emerged from the “mists of antiquity” to Queen Elizabeth. That being the cutoff date because James I/VI was a shared ruler of England and Scotland as much as anything else. The overall vibe is having a tipsy ramble with a history loving friend, which is a pretty enjoyable vibe. Mitchell’s leanings are anti-monarchist, and his thesis is that the royalty of England were bullies who bought into their own hype of being God’s chosen, but none of their individual accomplishments matter much compared to the trends of history.

29. The Dictionary People by Sarah Ogilvie. This book is the culmination of a research project, in which Ogilvie on her way out the door of a job working on the Oxford English Dictionary found the address book of James Murray, the longest tenured editor of the first edition. So she went and did as much research as she could on the various contributors to the project. The result is a testament to the powers of crowdsourcing as much as it is a celebration of the fringes of academic society in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The organization is alphabetical, which is charming, and the book takes on little biographical sketches of what is known of a wide swath of contributors. Highly recommended.

30. Tenacious Beasts by Christopher J. Preston. Also highly recommended. This book looks at some of the success stories of wildlife recovery in the United States and Europe. As it goes, it challenges the Western philosophy of humans being apart from nature, and argues that an interventionist approach is both necessary to help organisms recover and a return to previous practices (especially by Native American and First Nations peoples) that were underappreciated by the forces of industrialized imperialism. It adds the human element to a lot of ecological stories I was familiar with, but hadn’t thought about in that light.

[teepeecider]

It’s Māori language week in Aotearoa and The Oxford English Dictionary has just added quite a few Māori words that have crossed over in to common Pākehā usage. One is bc mahi - used in Māori contexts to mean work, activity, occupation, or employment". So I have been doing the mahi waterblasting the cidery yard. #Māori #TeReo #OED

[whatareyoureallyafraidof]

[aeolianblues]

Oxford Spelling

Oxford spelling (also Oxford English Dictionary spelling, Oxford style, or Oxford English spelling) is a spelling standard, named after its use by the Oxford University Press, that prescribes the use of British spelling in combination with the suffix -ize in words like realize and organization instead of -ise endings.

Do you mean Canadian English. Do you simply mean Canadian English, Wikipedia??

[wordsaficionado]

Obviously my favorite dictionary is the Oxford one but I do have to admire the pluck of Merriam-Webster. If I cannot find a word in Oxford, it’s usually there, which I appreciate but must admit I also judge.

[celexial]

July 3rd, 2023

Currently reading: The Professor and the Madman

[onenakedfarmer]

DAVID BOWIE

Don’t you love the Oxford Dictionary? When I first read it, I thought it was a really really long poem about everything.

[a-word-a-day-for-writers]

𝐀𝐥𝐩𝐞𝐧𝐠𝐥𝐨𝐰

AL-puhn-gloh

the rosy light of the setting or rising sun seen on high mountains

[thepastisalreadywritten]

4 December 2023

[borrowingcapybaras]

"They" has been in the English language as a singular pronoun (not just plural) since the 1300s, and singular "they" actually pre-dates singular "you". [Source]

[yetanotheremptypage]

Book rec:

Anyone who enjoys historical fiction and feminism may enjoy the book The Dictionary of Lost Words, a look at the creation of the first Oxford English Dictionary and the words it left out.

[west-o-the-moon]

John Donne was, according to Katherine Rundell, "a neologismist. He accounts for the first recorded use in the Oxford English Dictionary of around 340 words in the English language. Apprehensible, beauteousness, bystander, criminalist, emancipation, enripen, fecundate, horridness, imbrothelled, jig." — Rundell, Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne (Faber, 2022)