Blog
Menu
Select
Dictionary
English
OxfordWords blog
Turn over a new leaf

8 unexpected origins of everyday phrases

Let’s take a look at some phrases whose origins might not be quite what you think… 1. Pass the buck We all know that buck is informal American English for a dollar. Indeed, it can also be used for an Australian dollar, a New Zealand dollar, a South African rand, and an Indian rupee – […]

Read more »
swallows arguing

When it comes to pronunciation, there’s always something to argue about. And we’ve all done it –whether standing in line at Starbucks arguing about espresso or throwing down about whether or not to enunciate the ‘r’ in the second month of the year. So here’s more grist for the argument mill. 1. timbre If you’re […]

Read more »
male and female animals

What are the names for male and female animals?

We previously looked at the names for specific baby animals, so now it’s time to turn our attention to words for male and female animals. Explore the list below to discover the names for a female hedgehog, a male swan, and many others. animal female male ant queen / worker drone antelope doe buck bear […]

Read more »
New Zealand English

How good is your New Zealand English?

Do you know your hangi from your hongi? New Zealand English is the latest in our series of quizzes testing your knowledge of World Englishes: we’ve asked about British, American, Indian, Australian, South African, Northern Irish, and Canadian English, so it’s about time that we paid a visit to our Kiwi cousins. Whether you’ve visited New Zealand or […]

Read more »
The Jungle Book

Rudyard Kipling and The Jungle Book in the Oxford English Dictionary

“I am, by calling, a dealer in words; and words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.”  Rudyard Kipling’s linguistic legacy is apparent from the more than 2500 quotations from his works that appear in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED); the term Kiplingism even has its own entry. This turns out to […]

Read more »
happy and sad face

Laughing, crying, and disgust in languages around the world

Interjections like oh!, ah!, or phew! are natural ejaculations expressive of some feeling or emotion.  They are so called because they’re interjected (from Latin inter- ‘between’ and jacere ‘to throw’) between sentences, clauses, or words, mostly without grammatical connection. Although the interjection is often imitative, it is quite different from the onomatopoeia, which is the formation of a word […]

Read more »
The Merchant of Venice

Quiz: how well do you know Shakespeare’s language?

Do you fancy yourself something of a Shakespeare scholar? Can you separate falchion, scimitar, and poniard? Our friends in Children’s Books have put together a tough little quiz about the language of Shakespeare, so we wanted to share it and test OxfordWords readers. How will you do? William Shakespeare was an English dramatist, poet, and actor who is often […]

Read more »
The hot take has been rapidly rising in usage.

The rise of the ‘hot take’

In the social-media-driven world of today, the ‘hot take’ is the bread and butter of online publications. Recently added to OxfordDictionaries.com, the word hot take refers to ‘a piece of commentary, typically produced quickly in response to a recent event, whose primary purpose is to attract attention’. How ‘hot’ is the ‘hot take’? Quite hot. […]

Read more »
1 2 … 187

Categories

Tweets

Further Reading