Wordorigins.org

The 6th edition of the Shorter OED is officially released on 20 September, but it’s actually been available for some time from Amazon and other outlets.

The Shorter OED is not simply an abridged version of the OED, but an independently edited dictionary. The Shorter OED focuses on words that have been in use since 1700, so archaic words that fell out of use before that date are omitted. It is also not a historical dictionary, so it doesn’t contain all the citations of use in th big OED. But this makes it more useful as a quick reference for writers. It’s a two-volume work, also available on CD-ROM.

It’s listed at $175, but Amazon currently has it for $110.

The latest quarterly update of the OED online has been released. This one contains words between proter and purposive, plus a lot of out-of-sequence updates. New words in the range of Ps include Prozac, pubbing, and pupusa (mmmmh...pupusa). New out-of-sequence words include balls-out, chimichanga, and Kuiper belt. The complete list of new additions can be found here. Editor John Simpson has a short essay on the new additions here.

Strangely, the OED continues its policy of not correcting known errors in existing entries. Somehow, the greatest benefit of being online has not sunk into the editors heads. The 1909 misdating of jazz, for example, persists, even though the editorial staff are well aware and have amply verified and documented that this is an error.

In yet another case of a celebrity claiming ownership of a commonly used term, the AP reported yesterday that Paris Hilton is suing Hallmark over the use of her likeness and the phrase that’s hot in a greeting card. The card has a photo of Hilton’s head superimposed on a waitress’s body and she is telling a customer not to touch a plate because that’s hot.

4 Sep: Mark Liberman over at Language Log has an excellent discussion of the term viral language.

LEXICO’GRAPHER. n.s. A writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and signification of words.
—Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language, 1755

I included this quote in the last newsletter as part of the announcement of the change of the blog/newsletter name from A Way With Words to The Harmless Drudge. The new name is, of course, taken from Johnson’s famed dictionary definition.

But a reader wrote back complaining about the use of that in the definition, and Samuel Johnson or not, this was just plain incorrect. It should be, she said, who busies himself.