Monday, January 8, 2007

The OED Needs Our Help!

I spotted an article in the Washington Post the other day. It seems the venerable Oxford English Dictionary is branching out. In cooperation with the publisher of the OED, Oxford University Press, a wordhunt has been instituted to discover the etymologies of several words in the OED.

From the article, "According to the august Oxford English Dictionary, going bananas was simply not done before 1968, nobody went bonkers before 1957, and no one went to the loo before 1940 . . . So they are asking language-loving British television viewers to help them trace the murky etymological roots of 40 common English-language expressions, from "wolf whistle" to "regime change" to "sick puppy" . . . BBC officials said viewers sent in about 7000 e-mails about the 47 words on last year's list . . . and 35 entries in the dictionary were changed."

The dictionary is currently being revised, with an anticipated publication in another 20 years. The process has already been underway for more than ten years. Think you have the right (write?) stuff.

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