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Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Words are essential to our everyday lives. An average person spends his or her day enveloped in conversations, e-mails, phone calls, text messages, directions, headlines, and more. But how often do we stop to think about the origins of the words we use? Have you ever thought about which words in English have been borrowed from Arabic, Dutch, or Portuguese? Try admiral, landscape, and marmalade, just for starters.
The Secret Life of Words is a wide-ranging...
Author
Publisher
Pantheon Books
Pub. Date
[2017]
Language
English
Description
"Brimming with intelligence and personality, a vastly entertaining account of how dictionaries are made - a must read for word mavens. Have you ever tried to define the word "is?" Do you have strong feelings about the word (and, yes, it is a word) "irregardless?" Did you know that OMG was first used in 1917, in a letter to Winston Churchill? These are the questions that keep lexicographers up at night. While most of us might take dictionaries for...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Peter Martin recounts the patriotic fervor in the early American republic to produce a definitive national dictionary that would rival Samuel Johnson's 1755 Dictionary of the English Language. But what began as a cultural war of independence from Britain devolved into a battle among lexicographers, authors, scholars, and publishers, all vying for dictionary supremacy and shattering forever the dream of a unified American language.
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"I'm reading the OED so you don't have to. If you are interested in vocabulary that is both spectacularly useful and beautifully useless, read on..." So reports Ammon Shea, the tireless, word-obsessed, and more than slightly masochistic author of Reading the OED. The word lover's Mount Everest, the OED has enthralled logophiles since its initial publication 80 years ago. Weighing in at 137 pounds, it is the dictionary to end all dictionaries. In 26...
Author
Publisher
William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers
Pub. Date
[2022]
Language
English
Description
"The encyclopedia once shaped our understanding of the world. Created by thousands of scholars and the most obsessive of editors, a good set conveyed a sense of absolute wisdom on its reader. Contributions from Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Orville Wright, Alfred Hitchcock, Marie Curie and Indira Gandhi helped millions of children with their homework. Adults cleared their shelves in the belief that everything that was explainable was now effortlessly...
6) The word detective: searching for the meaning of it all at the Oxford English Dictionary : a memoir
Author
Publisher
Basic Books
Pub. Date
[2016]
Language
English
Description
"What do you call the part of a dog's back it can't scratch? Can you drink a glass of balderdash? And if, serendipitously, you find yourself in Serendip, then where exactly are you? The answers to all of these questions can be found in the Oxford English Dictionary, the definitive record of the English language. And there is no better guide to the dictionary's many wonderments, its quirks, and its quiddities than the former chief editor of the OED,...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
From the bestselling author of The Professor and the Madman, The Map That Changed the World, and Krakatoa. Writing with marvelous brio, Simon Winchester first serves up a lightning history of the English language and pays homage to the great dictionary makers from Samuel Johnson to Noah Webster before turning his unmatched talent for storytelling to the making of the most venerable of dictionaries - The Oxford English Dictionary. Here the listener...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
By the early eighteenth century, France and Italy had impressive lexicons, but there was no authoritative dictionary of English. Sensing the deficit, and impelled by a mixture of national pride and commercial expedience, the prodigious polymath Samuel Johnson embraced the task, turning over the garret of his London home to the creation of his own giant dictionary.
Johnson imagined that he could complete the job in three years. But, the complexity...
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
A New York Times Notable Book
The Professor and the Madman is an extraordinary tale of madness, genius, and the incredible obsessions of two remarkable men that led to the making of the Oxford English Dictionary—and literary history.
The making of the OED was one of the most ambitious projects ever undertaken. As definitions were collected, the overseeing committee, led by Professor James Murray,
...Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"In 1934, Webster's Second was the great gray eminence of American dictionaries, with 600,000 entries and numerous competitors but no rivals. It served as the all-knowing guide to the world of grammar and information, a kind of one-stop reference work. In 1961, Webster's Third came along and ignited an unprecedented controversy in America's newspapers, universities, and living rooms. The new dictionary's editor, Philip Gove, had overhauled Merriam's...
Author
Publisher
Alfred A. Knopf
Pub. Date
2023.
Language
English
Description
"The Oxford English Dictionary is one of mankind¿́¿s greatest achievements, and yet, curiously, its creators are almost never considered. Who were the people behind this unprecedented book? As Sarah Ogilvie reveals, they include three murderers, a collector of pornography, the daughter of Karl Marx, a president of Yale, a radical suffragette, a vicar who was later found dead in the cupboard of his chapel, an inventor of the first American subway,...
Author
Language
Español
Description
Este libro recoge por vez primera el léxico chipaya en forma sistemática, lengua vigente aún en Santa Ana de Chipaya (Bolivia), aunque históricamente localizada a lo largo del eje acuático Titicaca-Poopó.
En este libro, los lingüistas Rodolfo Cerrón-Palomino y Enrique Ballón Aguirre recogen por vez primera el léxico chipaya en forma sistemática. Vigente aún en su reducto orureño de Santa Ana de Chipaya (Bolivia), se trata de la última...
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
Adjectives have long suffered from bad press. For many years, English teachers have been fond of telling students that "adjectives are the enemy of nouns, and adverbs are the enemy of everything else."
While it's still advisable to heed your English teacher's advice on most other matters, The Highly Selective Dictionary of Golden Adjectives for the Extraordinarily Literate proves that breaking certain rules can make written and spoken language that...
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
“Problems in Lexicography” is an essential, classic work of practical lexicography (the practice of writing dictionaries) and meta-lexicography. Originally published over sixty years ago, it was based on the proceedings of the Indiana University Conference on Lexicography, held November 11—12, 1960. It set a standard that still holds today, three generations later.
This critical and historical edition, brilliantly researched and presented by...
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
Between TV talk shows, radio call-in programs, email and the Internet, spontaneous-talk media has skyrocketed in the '90s. People are interacting more frequently and more fervently than ever before, turning the English language into an indecipherable mess. Now, this unique and concise compendium presents the most confused and misused words in the language today -- words misused by careless speakers and writers everywhere. It defines, discerns and...
19) Vox Libri
Author
Language
English
Description
"Skimming through the short passages, the floating dust shimmered like raining glitter as it caught the light . . . An overwhelming wave of curiosity washed over. Plenty of books have caught Etta's eye before, but none created such an urgency to belong to her."
Etta is relatively new to Northampton, but has already established what she believes is a good routine - especially after getting a slow start. She has a steady job, she procrastinates...
Author
Language
Français
Description
Le parler kinois, pratiqué à Kinshasa et dans les communautés kinoises, constitue un mélange de lingala, de kikongo, de français et d'argot. Il ne respecte pas les règles de grammaire, mêlant le singulier et le pluriel, sans que cela ne vexe personne.
Ce lexique, loin d'être exhaustif - on s'en doute -, reprend cependant bon nombre de termes, d'expressions à la mode d'hier ou d'autres en vogue aujourd'hui et constitue en quelque sorte une...