An excerpt from Dictionary People investigates the story of amateurs collaborating alongside the academic elite to create a foundation for our vocabulary. Every item on this page was chosen by a Town ...

After graduate school, I treated myself to a full set — that's 20 very large and heavy volumes — of the Oxford English Dictionary for my home office. It was a very on-brand purchase for me, and also a ...

Just to work from "A" to "ant" took the original Oxford English Dictionary team around 10 years. They thought they'd reach "Z" in that time — but gathering definitions for hundreds of thousands of ...

From dropped words to fake definitions, learn fun facts, hearsay, and scandal about our most useful language resource, and the words that make it up. You might be surprised to learn what the most ...

"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 ...