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Domain: oed.com

Stories and comments across the archive that link to oed.com.

Stories · 4

  1. Help the OED Find a Lost Book

    News · Books · · posted by Unknown · from the doesn't-everyone-have-that-book dept. · 91 comments
    New submitter imlepid writes "The Oxford English Dictionary is currently undergoing a complete overhaul which includes a reexamination of the 300,000+ entries and citations for those entries. Understandably for a work which is over 150 years old, some of the sources have become hard to find. One such example is a book titled 'Meanderings of Memory' by Nightlark, which is cited 49 times in the OED, including for some rare words. The OED's editorial team has appealed to the public, 'Have you seen a copy of this book?'"

  2. OED Science Fiction Database Updated

    Science · Scifi · · posted by simoniker · from the flash-wordgone dept. · 267 comments
    solferino writes "The Oxford English dictionary commenced a project back in 2001 (Slashdot report) to solicit reader citations of the earliest uses of science fiction words. The most recent OED newsletter covers the progress of the project, which has its own site hosted on a FreeBSD box running a MySQL database engine. An interesting graph on the site shows date of word origin by decade. Surprisingly recent words featured on the site are /avatar/ (1990 - in the VR sense) and /morph/ (1993) - unless the Slashdot readership can report earlier uses?"

  3. Oxford Dictionary Does Science Fiction

    Science · Science · · posted by timothy · from the narfle-the-garthag dept. · 144 comments
    Embedded Geek writes: "The News Log for Locus has an item about the Oxford English Dictionary's attempt to capture unique words and phrases used in various fields. It has begun with a pilot site for science fiction. Specifically, they are looking for published uses of specific words in Science Fiction, SF Criticism, and SF Fandom. The goal is not to create a glossary of terms but rather find the earliest (antedating), latest (postdating), and intermediate (interdating) uses of these words already in the dictionary in books, magazines, etc. They are soliciting help from the public in this effort. Presumably, if this effort is a success, they will begin working on other fields: other literature, programming, open source... who knows?"

  4. Signs of the Apocalypse

    · posted by ryuzaki0 · from the yield-to-oncoming-memes dept. · 141 comments
    Recently we've had several sure signs that the Apocalypse is upon us. It's always a bit murky interpreting portents and omens, but I think these are clear indicators of impending doom. One, songs about instant messaging. Two, D'oh is now an official part of the English language. Three, square watermelon. I don't know how it could get any clearer than that: we're doomed.