2023: My Year in Astrophotography

11 January 2024

In case you didn’t know, I not only do words and historical linguistics, I’m also an amateur astrophotographer; that is, I take pictures of the night sky. I’ve been doing it, off and on, since 2008. This is a compilation of the images I’ve taken during the past year.

I post my images to the Astrophotography section of the Wordorigins website and to Astrobin.com. If you want all the technical details (equipment used, camera settings, etc.), Astrobin is the place to find them, along with images taken by amateur astrophotographers from around the world.

All but one of these images were taken from my driveway in Princeton, New Jersey, under Bortle 6 (bright suburban) skies.

2023 was a disappointing year for my astrophotography. I was plagued by equipment failures, and there were the Canadian wildfires that mucked up the skies for most of the summer. But in looking back, I did get a baker’s dozen of decent images.

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I started off the year with Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) on 1 February:

Comets are a challenging target to process. You need a long integration time to capture the faint tail, but during that period the comet is moving against the background stars. It’s a very different post-processing workflow than with deep sky images.

Next up was the Tadpole Nebula (NGC 1893) on 4 & 6 February. This one has a total of 7 hours, 4 minutes, and 30 seconds of integration time. It’s a false-color image using narrowband filters in the “Hubble palette” (so-called because it was invented for Hubble images), where light from Hydrogen-alpha ions is green, Oxygen-III ions are blue, and Sulfur-II ions are red. Shooting through narrowband filters like these, which only let light of a very specific wavelength to pass, allows you get details even from very light-polluted skies. But it’s only effective for emission nebulae that give off light in those wavelengths.

Bode’s Galaxy (M81) and the Cigar Galaxy (M82) is next. This one was taken over four nights from 13 February to 20 March, a total of 17 hours, 16 minutes, 30 seconds of integration time. This is a true-color (RGB) image enhanced with Hydrogen-Alpha emissions (representing star-forming regions) in red.

My image for April is something different, an image of the Sun taken through a solar telescope. Not only is the equipment different (you don’t want to point a regular telescope at the Sun), but technique for imaging the Sun and planets is different, called “lucky imaging.” Because the earth’s atmosphere creates “wobble” (what makes the stars twinkle), you take a short video and then use software to select the clearest frames, which you then stack together.

Spring is “Galaxy season” for the northern hemisphere, when we’re looking up away from the disk of the Milky Way and many galaxies are visible. I got this shot of the Sunflower Galaxy (M63) taken 11–18 May, a total of 14 hours, 25 minutes.

May also saw a supernova in the Pinwheel Galaxy (M101). It was discovered by a Japanese amateur astronomer, and I was one many who followed up with images of their own. Being able to see an exploding star in a galaxy some 20.9 million light-years from earth is pretty neat.

 This next one is the only one I took from somewhere other than my driveway. This is the North America (NGC 7000) and Pelican (IC 5070) Nebulae. This one was taken on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, a relatively dark sky site (Bortle 3, if you’re counting; Princeton is Bortle 6) on 11 July. This one is only 74 minutes of integration time, but with the darker skies that was enough.

On 1–2 August, I captured the Crescent Nebula (NGC 6888). The nebula is false-color, with Hydrogen-Alpha in the red channel and Oxygen-III in the blue and green (an HOO palette). The stars are true color. Since stars are relatively bright, you don’t need long integration times and light pollution is less of a concern than for the much fainter nebulae.

Later that month, on 19 and 20 August I captured the Wizard Nebula (NGC 7380). This one was five hours, 22 minutes total integration time. I actually got many more hours, but my telescope was knocked out of collimation (unusual for a refractor), and most of the frames were unusable. The ones I used were only saved by an AI-powered imaging processing tool, which managed to make the misshapen stars round. (The telescope has since been repaired.)

Come 1–4 October, I took this one of the Pacman Nebula (NGC 281). It’s 16 hours, 28 minutes of integration time. Again, its Hubble palette for the nebula and RGB for the stars.

On 10 and 12 October I imaged the Ghost of Cassiopeia (IC 63). This one 5 hours 20 minutes, RGB enhanced with Hydrogen-Alpha to show off the nebula.

Later that month I got a string of clear, moonless nights from 17–24 October and got this RGB image of the Pleiades (M45), a total of 23 hours, 32 minutes.

And my final image of the year was the Flaming Star Nebula (IC 405) on 1–2 November. This was another HOO image with RGB stars.

And in case you’re wondering, this is my telescope and mount, a Televue 127mm refractor on a Paramount MYT mount with a ZWO ASI2600 cooled, monochrome camera.

That is it for 2023. I only hope 2024 affords more opportunities, but the start has been inauspicious.

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ADS 2023 Word of the Year (WOTY)

6 January 2024

[Correction: There was error in the vote count in the original ADS press release for the Informal Word of the Year category. Let (someone) cook won that category. The error has been corrected.)

Yesterday, the American Dialect Society voted on its Word of the Year (WOTY) for 2023. It selected enshittification, a word coined by writer Cory Doctorow meaning the deliberate process by which online platforms become worse. The PDF of the ADS press release, listing all the categories, nominees, and vote totals, is here. The ADS uses a loose definition of word in its selection; any lexical item, as well as emojis and other signs, qualify. There are many WOTY processes conducted by many different organizations, including my own, but the ADS selection is the original, having been conducted for thirty-four years.

The ADS consists of (mostly) professional linguists and lexicographers, but the selection of WOTY is not an academically rigorous process. Unlike other organizations that have some sort of objective criteria (e.g., Merriam-Webster bases its choice on the frequency searches in its online dictionary, which for 2023 was authentic), the ADS process is informal. The evening before the vote, a small, self-selected group meets and comes up with nominations in the various categories. The categories are mostly consistent from year to year, but special categories can be created if there are a cluster of words on a particular topic. The next night several hundred conference attendees vote on the nominees, and nominations can be made from the floor. The process is raucous and fun, but the results can be skewed in all sorts of ways and should not be taken as serious and deliberative pronouncements. I’ve participated in the nomination and voting in past years and had planned to this year, but a bout with Covid kept me away. (I’m doing fine, thank you.) 

What follows are my observations on the nominees and choices. Like the WOTY voting itself, my opinions are not serious linguistic conclusions. Pretty much all the WOTY contests, no matter who conducts them, are simply entertainment for the lexically inclined among us.

As for enshittification, I think it’s a great choice. Not only is it a new coinage (not an ADS requirement, which only asks its WOTY be “newly prominent”) but it sums up the mood of 2023 generally and the demise of Twitter specifically. As for the other WOTY nominees (listed in order of number of votes):

• context: used in reference to the presidents of major universities testifying before Congress. This is a terrible selection that reflects two of the biases often found in WOTY selections: 1) a tendency to favor whatever is in the news in late December, and 2) words found mainly in academic circles.

• (derogatory): “parenthetical comment humorously appended after a word that might not be expected to be derogatory.” I haven’t seen this one in the wild, but then I’ve been reducing my social media consumption since Twitter imploded. Useful and funny.

• stochastic parrot: term for a generative AI, something that can generate text without understanding it. An apt description.

• ceasefire: in reference to the war in Gaza. Oddly, it is both too generic and too narrowly focused to be a good WOTY choice.

• girlie: “lighthearted and affectionate term of address for a young woman (also used in a broader more gender-inclusive way.” As a man of a certain age, I would never use this this one.

• let (someone) cook: “allow a person to do something that they are good at without interference.” This is a useful one. I like it.

• Kenaissance: If you have to choose one Barbie term for the year, this one ain’t it. I have no idea what it means; the ADS supplied definition doesn’t help. The obvious Barbie-oriented choice, Barbenheimer, didn’t even make the ADS cut. Shame.

• babygirl: “older male fictional character or celebrity seen as emotionally damaged, helpless, or vulnerable.” Yes, it’s sexist, but its utility as an insult appeals.

On to the categories. (derogatory) took the Most Useful/Most Likely to Succeed honors, an apt choice. The runners up:

• enshittification: a good choice, but its use of shit limits its application among more staid publishing outlets. Besides, sweeps of multiple categories are unseemly. It’s good to give other words a chance.

• girl/boy X: “way of doing something associated with gender, as in girl dinner, girl math, boy math.” I can see this one being used for a long time.

• cunty: “having an audaciously exceptional appearance or displaying fierce femininity.” Never heard of it, but the reason is because the ADS notes it is “from LGBTQ ballroom culture.” Those aren’t circles I move in, so I have no opinion.

• era: “a personal period defined by a noteworthy style or behavior (esp. in my X era).” This is what I like about the ADS WOTY process. Neat terms like this that would ordinarily fly under the radar get noticed. Not a contender, but it’s good that it’s recognized.

• mother: “(adj.) admirable (as a term of endearment); (v.) to perform something admirably (from LGBTQ ballroom culture).” See cunty.

The Political Word of the Year is the watermelon emoji 🍉, “symbol of Palestinian solidarity used on social media.” A superb choice. The runners up:

• hot labor/union summer: “summer of 2023, when a number of unions went on strike.” Not a bad choice, but not nearly as good as 🍉. Surprisingly, this one got a few more votes than the emoji on the first ballot, but lost in the run off.

• context: see above.

• I/P: shorthand for the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. This boring choice garnered one vote.

I’m getting too old for Digital Word of the Year. Evidently, I’m not on the hip social media platforms. Enshittification garnered top honors, as is right and good. But I’ve never heard of the others:

• chat: “collective term of address for those participating in a streamer’s chat.” Okay, but a bit pedestrian.

• skibidi: nonsense word popularized by the YouTube animated series Skibidi Toilet.” I do know what YouTube is; the rest is beyond me.

• millennial pause: “pause by a millennial at the beginning of a recorded video, as opposed to the Gen Z shake (shaky video at the start of a recording).”

• gamers: “second-person plural term of address, as on a gaming livestream.” See chat.

• ice cream so good: “response by TikTok streamer Pinkydoll to receiving an ice cream emoji.” See skibidi.

Let (someone) cook took the Informal Word of the Year. Followed by (derogatory) and babygirl. The others:

• rizz: “charm or attractiveness, now used as a combining form or blend component (rizzler, pre-rizz-toric).” This was one of ADS’s 2022 nominees, and Oxford University Press picked this one as its WOTY. I’ve never heard of it otherwise. But pre-rizz-toric is clever.

• gyat, gyatt: “exclamation expressing surprise, excitement, or admiration (esp. on seeing someone with a large butt).” Worth recording for posterity, I guess.

FAFO or fuck around and find out was the Acronym/Initialism of the Year. A solid choice. The runners up:

• AITA: am I the asshole, “question asked to an online audience (as on Reddit) to determine if a person is at fault in a situation.” Not sure why this one was newly prominent in 2023. It’s been around for ages.

• LFG: let’s fucking go. Useful, but pedestrian.

• IYKYK: if you know, you know. Ditto.

• MOOP: matter out of place, “waste material left behind at an event (esp. Burning Man).” Okay as a marker for what happened at Burning Man in 2023, otherwise pretty disposable.

AI-Related Word of the Year was an ad hoc category created this year, and stochastic parrot took top honors. The others:

• ChatGPT: “name for OpenAI’s chatbot, now becoming generic for generative AI systems.” Unremarkable except for the genericization.

• prompt engineer: “expert in devising text prompts for generative AI models.” A neat term and a potentially lucrative employment category in coming years.

• hallucination: “AI-generated response containing false information presented as factual.” Dictionary.com chose the verb form as its WOTY. I’m surprised this one didn‏‏’t get more love from those voting. It’s clever and useful, albeit not quite as fun as stochastic parrot.

• LLM: large language model. Yawn.

Kenaissance took the honors for Most Creative. I still have no clue what it means. The runners up:

• delulu: “delusion, as in delulu is the solulu (delusion is the solution).” To which I can only reply, “WTF?”

• assholocene: “the current era of human history, defined by the ubiquity of assholes.” This one should have won. Both clever and apt for 2023.

• tush push: “quarterback sneak for short yardage perfected by the Philadelphia Eagles.” I’m sorry, but a simple rhyme is not deserving of “most creative,” especially when brotherly shove was just sitting there.

Finally, we get to Euphemism of the Year, which is structurally restrictive housing, a euphemism for solitary confinement used by the New York City Department of Corrections. A brilliant choice. The others:

• artificial intelligence: ”computerized simulation of human intelligence that is not actually intelligent.” Given that the definition of intelligence is very slippery, I don’t think this one even qualifies as a euphemism.

• effective altruism: “movement ostensibly to benefit humanity, used as an excuse for spending other people’s money.” This one is a euphemism, for sure, but I couldn’t object more strenuously to the definition the ADS gives it. The problem with effective altruism isn’t the spending of other people’s money; the problem with it is that it’s a philosophical system that embraces genocide as a solution to humanity’s woes.

• stenographer: “journalist seen as uncritically reporting statements made by officials and others in power.” I’m looking at you, New York Times.

• free bird: “alternative to ‘empty-nester’ promoted by Gwyneth Paltrow.” I’m ambivalent on this one. One the one hand, making fun of Paltrow is entertaining. On the other, it’s too easy.

So that’s it. Comment via the link below, and keep your eyes and ears peeled for 2024 choices.

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Image credit: PantheraLeo1359531, 2023. Wikimedia Commons. Used under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

2023 Wordorigins Words of the Year (WOTY)

26 December 2023

As in past years, I’ve come up with a list of Words Of The Year (WOTY). I do things a bit differently from other sites in that I don’t try to select one term to represent the entire year. Instead, I select twelve terms, one for each month.

During the year as each month passed, I selected one word or phrase that was linguistically interesting, prominent in public discourse, or representative of major events of that month. Other such lists that are compiled at year’s end often exhibit a bias toward terms that are in vogue in November or December, and my hope is that a monthly list will highlight words that were significant earlier in the year and give a more comprehensive retrospective of the planet’s entire circuit around the sun. I also don’t publish the list until late in December; selections of words of the year that are made in November (or even earlier!), as some of them are, make no sense to me. You cannot legitimately select a word to represent a year when you’ve still got over a month or more left to go.

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ChatGPT Logo

January: generative AI

Generative AI is a computer tool (i.e., artificial intelligence) that, in response to a prompt, can produce new content (e.g., text or images) based on a large database of representative samples.

In November 2022, the OpenAI company launched ChatGPT, a generative AI, a large language-model, artificial intelligence that is capable of producing sensible and grammatically correct text in a wide variety of writing styles on a seemingly limitless number of topics. By January it, along with its companion product DALL-E, which generated images, was the hot new thing. Bold predictions of it replacing much of the white-collar workforce were followed by revelations that ChatGPT “hallucinated” and simply invented facts. And lawsuits based on copyright infringement for unauthorized use of text and images to train the AI followed that. While much of the hype over generative AI is overblown, there is no doubt it will transform society and the economy in ways we are only beginning to fathom.

The term generative AI has been in use since at least 2012.

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Supposed UAP/UFO, Passaic, New Jersey, 1952

February: UAP

UAP is an acronym for Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon, a term that is replacing UFO (Unidentified Flying Object) in certain circles because the latter term has become indelibly associated with supposed extraterrestrial visitation and the tinfoil-hat crowd. In late January and early February, the US Air Force tracked and shot down a Chinese spy balloon that traversed the United States. That was followed by reporting of other interceptions and downings of other UAPs by the Air Force.

UAP has been in use since 1963 but rose in prominence in February.

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Emoji of a pile of shit

March: enshittification

Enshittification, or platform decay, is the tendency of online platforms to decline in quality, often as a strategy by the owners to generate more revenue. The pattern typically has an initial phase that makes it easy for users to join the network and that offers value. Then as the platform becomes ubiquitous, the owners offer lower value and raise prices, but users find it difficult to leave because of high switching costs (all your friends are on Facebook or Amazon penalizes sellers who offer their products elsewhere).

In March 2023, the new owner of Twitter, Elon Musk, literally turned Twitter to shit when in response to press criticism of his takeover of the company tweeted the following: “press@twitter.com now auto responds with 💩.”

Enshittification was coined by writer Cory Doctorow in November 2022.

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Elon Musk, and his dog, standing amid the wreckage of the Starship spacecraft that crashed on landing in December 2020

April: rapid unplanned disassembly (RUD)

On 20 April, a test of SpaceX’s Starship rocket resulted in what the company’s engineers called a rapid unplanned disassembly. In other words, it blew up shortly after launch. A second attempt to launch the rocket into orbit in November also resulted in its exploding. Previous sub-orbital attempts starting in 2020 were also failures, either blowing up or crashing upon landing. While such failures are to be expected in rocket testing, the repeated failures were yet another public relations disaster for Elon Musk, who is the chairman and CEO of SpaceX.

But this was not the first time the euphemism rapid unplanned disassembly has been used. That’s been a tongue-in-cheek engineering expression since at least 1991. The phrase has also spawned an acronym, RUD.

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Edward VII and Queen Alexandra in their coronation robes, 1902

May: coronation

On 6 May, Charles III was crowned, or coronated, King of the United Kingdom and Other Commonwealth Realms. It was the first British coronation in seventy years.

Coronation is a fourteenth-century borrowing of the Anglo-Norman coronacion, which in turn is taken from the Latin coronamen, to wreathe or crown.

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First page of the June 2023 federal indictment of Donald Trump for mishandling classified documents

June: indictment

On 8 June, Justice Department Special Counsel Jack Smith indicted Donald Trump on forty felony counts relating to the retention and mishandling of classified information. Earlier, in March, Trump had been indicted by New York state for falsifying business records related to hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels made during the 2016 presidential campaign. And in August, Smith again indicted Trump, this time on four counts related to the storming of the Capitol on 6 January 2021, and the state of Georgia indicted Trump on thirteen counts related to attempts to overturn the 2020 election results in that state. This is the first time that a president or former president has ever been indicted for a crime.

Indictment is a fourteenth-century borrowing of the Anglo-Norman enditement.

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July: Barbenheimer

On 21 July, the feature films Barbie, directed by Greta Gerwig, and Oppenheimer, directed by Christopher Nolan, were released to theaters in the US and UK. Both were enormously successful, with Barbie earning over $1.4 billion at the box office and Oppenheimer over $950 million. Despite the unlikely pairing of a movie about a doll and a movie about the inventor of the atomic bomb, many people took to watching the films as a double feature, and the portmanteau and internet phenomenon of Barbenheimer was born. Instead of creating competition, the simultaneous release boosted the box office take of both films and marked a milestone in the post-pandemic recovery of movie theaters.

The first known use of Barbenheimer was on 15 April, in anticipation of the films’ release.

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Chandrayaan-3 lander on the moon’s surface, taken by the Pragyan rover, 20 August 2023

August: Chandrayaan

India’s Chandrayaan-3 rover landed on the moon on 23 August, making India the fourth nation to successful land on the moon and the first to do so in the moon’s south polar region. Landing at the poles is more difficult and fuel-intensive than landing in the equatorial regions, where the US, Russian, and Chinese missions had all set down. The 2008 Chandrayaan-1 mission consisted of an orbiter and impactor, which discovered water in the polar region. The second mission consisted of an orbiter and a lander, but the lander crashed in September 2019. The orbiter is still operational. The third mission’s lander operated for only twelve days, conducting a number of scientific missions including the detection of a potential moonquake, before being put into sleep mode in preparation for the lunar night, which it was not expected to and did not survive. The mission’s success marks India’s rise as one of the world’s technology leaders. In April, the United Nations estimated that India’s population had exceeded that of China’s, making it the most populous nation.

Chandrayaan is a compound of the Sanskrit and Hindi words chandra (चंद्र, moon) and yaan (यान, vehicle).

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President Biden speaking to striking auto workers on a picket line, 26 September 2023

September: picket

On 26 September, US President Biden briefly joined striking United Auto Workers on a picket line in Michigan. It was the first time a US president had ever done that. The workers were striking for higher wages and cost-of-living increases, an attempt to claw back losses they had suffered over previous decades. The strike against all three major auto manufacturers was successful, with new contracts negotiated in October. 2023 saw a resurgence of organized labor in the United States, with strikes that included television and film actors and writers and new attempts to organize unions in companies like Starbucks, Apple, Trader Joe’s, REI, and Barnes and Noble.

The use of picket in the context of workers strikes dates to at least 1818.

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Palestinian refugees, 1948

October: Nakba

The Arabic النكبة (al-Nakba, The Catastrophe) was the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people from the territory of the State of Israel in 1948, and the word is also used to refer to the ongoing occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. The word gained renewed salience and was used in multiple news reports following the attack on Israel by Hamas on 7 October and the subsequent retaliation by Israel military forces. Nakba corresponds to the Hebrew Shoah (שואה), which also means catastrophe and is used to refer to the Holocaust. Both words have been common in English-language discourse since the 1980s.

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Adolf Hitler practicing his oratorical gestures, 1927

November: vermin

In a political speech on 11 November, Veteran’s Day, Donald Trump went full Nazi, referring to his political enemies as vermin. While in the past, Trump has often used offensive language in referring to his opponents, his use of this word echoed the rhetoric of speeches by Adolph Hitler and Nazi propaganda and baldly associated himself with the growing fascist movement in America. Trump said:

In honor of our great veterans on Veteran’s Day, we pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections and will do anything possible, they’ll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American Dream.

Many news reports of Trump’s speech compared it to a quote attributed to Hitler that used the word Ungeziefer (vermin):

Die Natur ist grausam, darum dürfen wir es auch sein. Wenn ich die Blüte der Deutschen in die Stahlgewitter des kommenden Krieges schicke, ohne auch nur um das kostbare deutsche Blut, das vergossen wird, das leiseste Bedauern zu verspüren, sollte ich dann nicht das Recht haben, Millionen einer minderwertigen, sich wie das Ungeziefer vermehrenden

(Nature is cruel; therefore, we are also entitled to be cruel. When I send the flower of German youth into the steel hail of the next war without feeling the slightest regret over the precious German blood that is being spilled, should I not also have the right to eliminate millions of an inferior race that multiplies like vermin?)

The quote is from Herman Rauschning’s Gespräche mit Hitler, an account of that politician’s conversations with Hitler during 1932–34. Rauschning was a conservative German politician who briefly aligned with the Nazi party in the early 1930s, before breaking with Hitler and fleeing the country in 1934. The book was published in exile in 1940. Rauschning does not give a date or a context for this conversation, however, and he was writing from memory and notes. So while the quotation should not be considered a verbatim account of Hitler’s words, he probably said something very similar to this. And Ungeziefer was commonly used in Nazi writing to refer to those it wished to exterminate.

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Taylor Swift on stage during her 2023 Eras tour

December: Swiftie

A Swiftie is a fan of singer-songwriter Taylor Swift. Few non-politicians have been so consistently in the news throughout the year as has Swift. Her Eras tour grossed over a billion dollars during the year—the highest of all time. She is also estimated to have generated some US$5 billion in consumer spending during the year. But her impact goes well beyond the world of entertainment. She is a staunch supporter of feminist and LGBTQ+ causes. She is pro-choice and supports gun control measures and the Black Lives Matter movement. In 2020, she posted on social media urging her fans to vote, resulting in 65,000 voter registrations in the next twenty-four hours. She did the same thing in 2023, resulting in some 35,000 registrations. In December, Time named her its Person of the Year, the first woman to be so named twice (in 2017 she was featured as one of the “Silence Breakers” of the Me Too movement) and the first from the world of entertainment to be so named.

Swiftie has been in use since least 2010 as a nickname for the singer and since 2013 as a name for a fan of hers.

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Image Credits: 2023: Davi Revoy, 2023, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license; Generative AI: OpenAI and Zhing Za, 2023, Wikimedia Commons, public domain image; UAP: George Stock, 1952, Wikimedia Commons, public domain image; Enshittification: Openemoji.org, 2018, Wikimedia Commons, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license; Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly: Steve Jurvetson, 2020, Wikimedia Commons, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license; Coronation: W. & D. Downey, 1902, Royal Collection RCIN 2933174, public domain work; Indictment: US Department of Justice, 2023, public domain work; Barbenheimer: Bazi, 2023, Wikimedia Commons, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license; Chandrayaan: India Space Research Organization, 2023, Wikimedia Commons, licensed under a Government Open Data License—India (GODL); Picket: Adam Schultz (White House photo), 2023, Wikimedia Commons, public domain image; Nakba: Fred Csasznik, 1948, Wikimedia Commons, public domain image; Vermin: Heinrich Hoffmann, 1927, Wikimedia Commons, Bundesarchiv Bild 102-13774, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Germany license; Swiftie: Paolo Villanueva, 2023, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

The OED Has a New Look

An entry on the new OED user interface

30 July 2023

The Oxford English Dictionary Online has undergone a major facelift. It’s still the same dictionary; the data is unchanged, but the user interface and the look and feel of the website is significantly different. I’ve seen a lot of kvetching by regular users of the dictionary about the changes, but on the whole, I think it’s a superb update, well thought out and executed.

My first reaction was horror, though. All too often, sites and software packages undergo revisions without any reason behind them, moving icons around the page for no apparent reason, etc. But after using the new OED for a week, I’ve come to embrace the changes.

For those who have never used it, the Oxford English Dictionary is without question the most comprehensive and best researched dictionary of the English language, if not any language. Its entries contain usage citations that outline a word’s history. If the OED has a significant drawback, it’s that it is so large and its editorial standards are so high, that it is slow to update. The editors do an admirable job with the resources at hand, but like an oil tanker, it is slow to change course. But with this change the dictionary has made a major course correction, at least in its user interface.

First and foremost, the new OED site works well with smartphones. The old site was clunky and hard to read on a small screen, but the new site is designed to function easily on a phone. I don’t know what the OED’s usage statistics are, but 72% of the visits to Wordorigins.org are from smartphones. I imagine the OED’s statistics are similar, and the dictionary should not ignore huge swaths of its user base. I do most of my work at a computer, with two screens and a mouse, but I occasionally use my phone to do a quick look up of a word, and the experience with the old interface was terrible, almost unusable. The new one is far superior on a phone or tablet.

The second big change is the dictionary’s site now has a tabbed view as default. The tabs are:

• Factsheet (a quick overview of the entry; technically not a tab but either a landing page or a pop-up window if you are logged in)

• Meaning & Use (definitions)

• Pronunciation

• Forms

• Frequency

• Compounds & Derived Words

Users without a paid subscription (either individual or through an institution) have access to only the Factsheet. Subscribers who are not logged in also get the Factsheet as their landing page when they search for a word. Subscribers who are logged in get the Meaning & Use tab, the one with the definitions, as their landing page. And when one arrives at the Meaning & Use page, the usage citations are compressed by default, with only the earliest and latest citation for any given sense displayed; you must click to expand the window and see all the citations. This change reduces scrolling, which is especially welcome on mobile devices with small screens.

These two changes, the tabs and compressed citations, form the bulk of the complaints about the new interface that I’ve heard. But again, these were, I assume, put in place to make it easier for smartphone users. Scrolling through a long entry is relatively easy on a computer with a big screen and mouse but is a hassle on a phone or tablet. But if one likes everything on one page with no clicks to see details, that is available.

You can set up a personal account, which is distinct from your subscription status. You don’t need to have a subscription to have an account, and if you have access through an institutional subscription (e.g., through a library or university), your personal account is unconnected with your institution. In your account, you can set your preferences as to whether you want a tabbed view or everything on one page and whether usage citations are compressed or displayed in full. I’ve set my preferences to a single page with all citations shown, but I may switch to back to tabs and the compressed citations. I’m still trying to figure out which I prefer.

One improvement the OED could make is to allow users to have two sets of preferences, one for computers and one for mobile devices. Currently, you can only optimize the interface for one type of device. But there is a workaround: because the subscriber login is different from the personal account login, you can log into your personal account on your computer and not log in on your phone. This allows you change the display on your computer, leaving the phone at the default, which is optimized for mobile devices.

Another minor improvement is of inestimable help. With the old interface, it was easy to get lost among the senses in a long entry. They were numbered, but only the last character of the numbering was displayed alongside the sense. For instance, if you were looking at sense VII.91.c. for the verb set, only the c. was displayed next to the definition. You had to scroll, sometimes a great distance, to get the full number. With the new interface, the full designation is displayed next to the definition.

Another welcome improvement is that each page contains a “Contribute” link in the header that allows a user to submit comments, additions, or corrections to the entry. Previously, the contact link was buried in the “front-matter” and all but impossible to find.

But not all is perfect. There is an issue with logging in. If you have access via an institutional account, you must log in twice, once via the institution and once for your personal account, in order to use your saved preferences and searches. This would not be so problematic, except the OED automatically logs you out after 45 minutes—regardless of whether or not you are continuously active on the site. The logic behind this is clear; the Oxford UP doesn’t want the access to remain open on public computers. It is likely that the overwhelming number of users log in to look up a single word and remain online for only a few minutes at most. But there are power users, linguistic researchers, who are few in number but make up a significant portion of the total hours logged into the OED. For these, the most loyal and dedicated of the dictionary’s users, the login policy is a major inconvenience. This automatic logout policy needs to be changed. And the fix is easy—upon login require users to specify whether they are working from a personal or shared computer and set the cookie duration appropriately. Banks and financial institutions do this on their sites, and they process much more sensitive information than a dictionary ever would. And what is the harm of having a cookie remain viable for several hours? Some unauthorized user might get to look up an etymology without paying? It is neither a threat to security nor to the OED’s revenue stream.

Another problem is unrelated to the interface and is not new. That is the dictionary does not present a clear record of when and how an entry has been updated. Given that the OED’s entries vary in age, some having not been revised in over a century, and knowing exactly has been changed is often critical to researchers. For instance, the entry for set, v.1 says it was “first published in 1912; not yet revised,” but that it was also “last modified in April 2023.” It further gives the general statement that such modifications short of revision may include: “corrections and revisions to definitions, pronunciation, etymology, headwords, variant spellings, quotations, and dates; new senses, phrases, and quotations which have been added in subsequent print and online update.” This is too general a description to be of any help. If I am doing etymological work, I really would like to know if the etymology given in the entry was updated a few months ago or if it is over 110 years old. The dictionary needs a wiki-style revision-history tab for each entry.

And there is one other problem. It is minor and probably bothers no one except the ex-marketing person in me; it has to do with the OED’s logo. The old interface had the words Oxford English Dictionary displayed in a distinctive, serif typeface. The typeface was nothing special, but it was distinctive and instantly recognizable. The new interface has replaced this with a boring, utterly unremarkable, sans serif one. It is distinctive only in its amateurish look. The landing page when one is not logged in has a distinctive graphic resembling a starburst, a representation of a spiral data plot. It looks good, but it is not repeated anywhere else. The key to a good logo is that it is appears on everything related to the product. A miniature version of the data starburst should be at the top of every page with OED displayed in the old, instantly recognizable typeface, tying the storied history of the dictionary with advances in data science and visualization.

Still, the faults with the new interface are minor and the changes most welcome. I believe that those who are currently kvetching about the changes will, like me, come around to embrace them as they familiarize themselves with the new interface.

Discuss this post

white nosed

Virginia Woolf, left; Vita Sackville-West, right

6 May 2023

I’ve been working on an article on the perils of relying upon the abbreviated citations found in historical dictionaries like the Oxford English Dictionary without looking up the originals and viewing them in context, and today I nearly fell victim to the same.

A friend of mine was reading the letters exchanged by Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West and came across the following in a letter written by Woolf to Sackville-West on 14 October 1927:

Never do I leave you without thinking, its [sic] for the last time. And the truth is, we gain as much as we lose by this. Since I am always certain you'll be off and on with another next Thursday week (you say so yourself, bad creature, at the end of your last letter, which is where the viper carries its sting) since all our intercourse is tinged with this melancholy on my part and desire to be white nosed and so keep you half an instant longer, perhaps, as I say we gain in intensity what we lack in the sober comfortable virtues of a prolonged and safe and respectable and chaste and cold blooded friendship.

She was struck by the unfamiliar white nosed and wondered what it could mean.

I quickly found the book she had been reading, and I saw, but did not register, that the source, Mitchell Leaska and Louise DeSalvo’s The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf, contains only an extract from the letter.

But intrigued by the question I heedlessly plunged forward looking for white nosed in the usual dictionaries and online repositories of texts. That search turned up nothing except that white nosed is frequently used in the names and descriptions of various animals, which clearly was not the sense Woolf intended.

But turning to Joseph Wright’s 1905 English Dialect Dictionary I thought I’d found the answer. According to Wright, what or wot is a dialectal pronunciation of hot. What being found in the West Country, and in particular Devon, and wot being found more generally across England. And what-nosed is a West Country term literally meaning hot-nosed. Francis Grose’s 1790 Provincial Glossary records the following:

What-Nosed, Hot-nosed; red-nosed, from drinking. West [Country].

Woolf holidayed in Cornwall throughout her life, and I concluded that it was likely she had heard the term and, not having seen it in writing, interpreted it as white-nosed. In context, her desire to drown her melancholy in booze, metaphorically at least, at Sackville-West’s absence made sense. In my thinking, she was deploying a dialectal phrase presumably used by those of low social status to mark a relationship that society would disapprove of. She then contrasted its meaning, to be drunk or hot, with the “sober” and “cold-blooded” virtues that society demanded. She would rather drink deep in the presence of Sackville-West, keeping her “half an instant longer” than parting and settling for the staid, respectable relationship expected of them. This was an example of the skill and care that Woolf took in her writing, even in informal correspondence never intended for publication. Or so I thought.

I posted these initial thoughts to the Wordorigins.org discussion forum and received some pushback to my interpretation. But at the suggestion of Languagehat, and this is where I was saved from publishing it some more permanent form, went looking to see if any Woolf scholars had annotated the letter or if Woolf had used the term in other correspondence.

I found nothing in Woolf’s diaries, and then I turned to the multi-volume edition of her complete letters, edited by Nigel Nicolson. I found that this letter was the only one in which she used white nosed, and I finally started read the complete letter, discovering that the letter starts:

“Well thank God Vita aint coming” I said, putting the telegram down with a snort.

“And why do you say that?” asked Leonard, looking up from his pocket handkerchief. To which I had no answer ready: but the true one was: Because my nose is red.

The poor Wolves have been having colds in the head. Mine I caught in a dentists waiting room: but that’s neither here nor there. The point is the incident symbolizes our friendship. Now think carefully what I mean by that. There’s a dying hue over it: it shows the dolphin colours of decay. Never do I leave you without thinking, its [sic] for the last time….

Clearly, her use of white nosed is in contrast to literally having a red nose from a cold, and it simply means that she wishes she wasn’t ill so that Sackville-West could visit.

I nearly got carried away with what I thought was the use of an obscure, dialectal phrase by a great writer.

Now, that leaves me with what the heck does dolphin colour mean?

Discuss this post

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Sources:

Grose, Francis. A Provincial Glossary. London: S. Hooper, 1790, n.p., s.v. what-nosed. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Woolf, Virginia. Letter to Vita Sackville-West, 14 October 1927. In Mitchell Leaska and Louise DeSalvo, eds. The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf (1984). San Francisco: Cleis Press, 2001, 240. Clarivate: Alexander Street.

———. Letter to Vita Sackville-West 14 October 1927 (Letter #1821). In Nigel Nicolson. The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. 3, 1923–28. London: Hogarth Press, 1977, 429–430. Archive.org.

Wright, Joseph. English Dialect Dictionary, vol. 6 of 6. Oxford: Henry Frowde, 1905, s.v. what-nosed, ppl. adj., wot, adj. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Photo credits: Virginia Woolf, 1902, by George Charles Beresford, Wikimedia Commons; Vita Sackville-West, c.1915, unknown photographer, Wikimedia Commons; both photos are in the public domain.