Blogs

Oxford University Press, in revising the headword list of their Junior Dictionary, gave rise to a discussion in the British press… Read more…

Spare a thought for the words that disappear from use because the thing they represent becomes outmoded. Read more…

Recently we discovered that some of us used the little word quite in quite different ways. Some of us were quite devastated by this. Read more…

The spelling gaol was the accepted spelling in Australian English until the 1990s… Read more…

The phrase fit as a fiddle dates back to the 1600s in British English, but had a slightly different meaning then. Read more…

A bit of research revealed to me that far-flung instead of far-fetched was gaining in frequency. Read more…

Crunching words together to make a new coinage has been a popular pastime in the English language since the nineteenth century… Read more…

There is so much symbolism surrounding the festival of Easter that it is hard to unpick. Read more…

Just as we love our antique bric-a-brac, so too do we love our antique words. We pick up an object, speculate on its purpose in life, admire its shape and colour even if we have no idea where it came from and what it is supposed to do. Read more…

To dispatch or to despatch – that was the question from a dictionary user who had been taught at school that despatch was correct and dispatch was incorrect. Read more…