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 ...

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 ...

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.

The Oxford English Dictionary has added more than 20 new words from three African countries, reflecting the growing global ...

The NYT’s guide is particularly notable for its insistence that a significant amount of today’s slang isn’t new at all. The ...

World Dictionary Day takes place on October 16, the birthday of the American lexicographer Noah Webster, whose enormous, two-volume An American Dictionary of the English Language—published in 1828, ...

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 ...

In my teenage years, I believed my father knew every word in the English language. Whenever I stumbled upon an unfamiliar phrase, I would run to him and he would explain it with the calm authority of ...

The Oxford English Dictionary added 42 new words borrowed from other languages, including gigil, a Tagalog expression for witnessing something adorable. By Gina Cherelus Need a word to emphasize that ...

Mr. Tersigni is a cultural critic. Have you ever obeyed the suggestions of a digital writing assistant to replace a word or restructure a sentence without knowing how, why or even if it made your ...