In July 1915 an ailing James Murray (pictured), one of the early editors of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), defined one final word. He had dedicated 36 years to the dictionary; his toil had taken ...

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 ...

Two decades ago, Oxford University Press invited David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, Simon Winchester and five other distinguished writers, as well as one bookish journalist, to contribute usage notes ...

Note: If you don’t like to read the c-word, you should probably stop reading. On the rare occasion that people think of lexicographers, they don’t usually imagine those scholars sitting around ...

Charles Hefling and Cynthia Shattuck, eds. Oxford University Press Nothing illustrates the evolution of Anglicanism more than the changing role of the Book of Common Prayer. For centuries the prayer ...

IN The Poet’s Tongue, an independent, diverting, exciting anthology, published in 1935 with as confusing an index as ever man or poet, devised, Mr. Auden (in collaboration) declared himself a charming ...

A new influx of Korean words is making the English language "more diverse and beautiful," says linguist Jieun Kiaer. The Oxford English Dictionary, one of the most recognizable authorities on the ...

While F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” is probably the most studied novel in modern American literature, Christopher A. Snyder’s “Gatsby’s Oxford” considers the book from an important, if ...