Tottenham Hotspur’s protests about the OED’s definition of the Y-word may be understandable, but are misplaced Protests against dictionaries are nothing new. In the 1960s, distaste for the treatment ...

Black Americans have long contributed to the ways in which the English language is used, and now a new research project aims to compile the first Oxford Dictionary of African American English.

To compile a dictionary of nearly every word in the English language was an endeavor typical of Victorian times, complete with white-bearded gentlemen, utter confidence and an endearingly plodding ...

The great lexicographers understood that a worthy dictionary was descriptive, not prescriptive. It would simply record what we’ve already agreed upon socially You can save this article by registering ...

"Just how far removed we had already become from Britain even in the nineteenth century was not well understood in the mother country," begins an essay in the first pages of the Canadian Oxford ...

A friend in need is a friend indeed,” says a Latin proverb and according to me it aptly defines ‘dictionary’. There are many ways through which a person can find out more about words, but the best one ...

A Q&A with Kory Stamper, an editor at Merriam-Webster and author of ’Word By Word,’ on profanity, and the politics of language Kory Stamper, an editor at Merriam-Webster and one of the dictionary ...

Leading online reference announces more than 15,000 changes, intended to foreground people over clinical language Dictionary.com is making major changes to more than 15,000 of its definitions, from ...

Generations ago, most Canadian Inuit lived in small seasonal camps but, over the past 60 years, Inuit have settled into permanent towns, where traditional dialects intermingled and sometimes developed ...

The first dictionaries of the country's myriad ethnic languages without native written forms are rolling off the presses. As the foundations of the Middle Kingdom's Tower of Babel weaken, the ...