Wordorigins.org

The Dictionary of Newfoundland English Online is a free, online version of the regional dictionary published by the University of Toronto.

One of the daunting things about looking at Old English text is the alphabet. It has, to the modern English speaker, some odd characters. These put people off, although they are not difficult to master. Less obvious is the fact that some modern letters are absent from Old English texts.

Modern versions of Old English texts frequently add diacritical marks, usually as an aid in pronunciation (or, more accurately, an aid in how the transcriber thinks the words were pronounced). These do not exist in the original texts and can usually be ignored.

Slate has a neat video featuring a British-born reporter visiting a dialect coach to find out how British actors learn to speak with American accents.

Do you have any little bottles of water?

With the New York Times ending their disastrous “TimesSelect” online service (that charged people for “premium” content, the equivalent of which was given away for free by every other newspaper in the country), the entire archive of New York Times articles, dating back to 1851, is now available for free to everyone. Simply go to www.nytimes.com and do a search.

The archive is broken into two sections: articles since 1981 and articles published between 1851 and 1981. The older articles are delivered as PDF documents. Unfortunately, they’re not full text searchable once downloaded, so locating the exact word or phrase your looking for in the article can be a challenge. But for a free service, this is a minor annoyance.

Dizzy sounds like it should be a fairly recent coinage. The double z makes it seem very modern and the word has a slangy air about it. But this couldn’t be further from the truth. Dizzy is a very old word, going back to the Old English dysig or dyseg, meaning foolish or stupid. The word appears in the Vespasian Hymns from c.825:

swe folc dysig (such dizzy folk)