Tag Archives: Oxford English Dictionary

Oil has poise(s)

One for the science and metaphor files? From “The Thermodynamics of Glass“: A liquid has viscosity, a measure of its resistance to flow.  The viscosity of water at room temperature is about 0.01 poises.  A thick oil might have a viscosity of about 1.0 poise. Now, OED lets us know that “poise, n.1” is originally […]

25.02.2013 – 12:16 | By D-AW | Posted in Dictionaries and Lexicography, Etymology | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

Poetry and the Dictionary Conference – Oxford 2013

The CFP for this summer’s conference in Oxford has been posted. I expect to be there discussing some aspect of the OED and poetry. This symposium will be held at St Peter’s College, Oxford, on 15 June, 2013, with a view to opening up and exploring connections between poetry and the dictionary. Proposals for papers […]

13.02.2013 – 09:27 | By D-AW | Posted in Dictionaries and Lexicography, Digital Humanities, Etymology, Poetry | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Three OED Poems

Recent posts on found poetry reminded me of several OED entries I  bookmarked out over the years because they gave me more than the usual pleasures of etymology, definition, and commonplace-book-like selection of previous uses. So I decided to work up a couple of these into poems. Other than acts of lineation, punctuation, elision, and […]

01.02.2013 – 09:19 | By D-AW | Posted in Dictionaries and Lexicography, Poetry | Tagged , , | Comments (3)

OED Curiosity Rovers

As part of some computer housekeeping, I’ve made up a little inventory of the Python programs I’ve developed to have a peek inside the massive text file that is the Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition. Here’s a list: 1. Field Comparison Tool – Look for Intertextuality in poems *I discussed some this program in the […]

24.08.2012 – 14:31 | By D-AW | Posted in Dictionaries and Lexicography, Digital Humanities, General, Linguistics | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

The most and least poetic alphabetical ranges in the OED

In my presentation at DH2012 I made a couple of comments on Giles Goodland’s paper ‘OED Online’s Single-Quotations Entries: an Analysis‘, mostly about the sampling method that Goodland employs, and which everyone else has employed so far when trying to say something about the OED that isn’t facilitated by whatever the current online functionality happens […]

26.07.2012 – 12:27 | By D-AW | Posted in Dictionaries and Lexicography, Digital Humanities, Linguistics, Poetry | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

Discovery: the most poetic word in the English language

Now that I’ve tagged more than half of the evidence quotations in OED2 for genre [see here and here for a discussion of this process], it’s time to start having a poke around in the data. A question that occurred to me last night was: ‘is there anything interesting about the relative density of poetic vs. […]

25.07.2012 – 15:01 | By D-AW | Posted in Dictionaries and Lexicography, Digital Humanities, Linguistics, Poetry | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Electronic OED, Poetry and Intertextuality :: DH2012 Presentation Slides

Here are the slides for my presentation today at Digital Humanities 2012 in Hamburg: PDF: Electronic OED, Poetry and Intertextuality [de-linked*] At the moment this is for reference or information only, and is presented here without the necessary context and discussion in my conference paper (to be posted at a later date). An abstract with […]

19.07.2012 – 06:00 | By D-AW | Posted in Dictionaries and Lexicography, Digital Humanities, Etymology, Poetry | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (0)

More Common: ‘Foot’ or ‘Etymologically’?

The OED’s etymology sections are jammed full of technical terms like ‘aphetic’, ‘stem’, and ‘neut.’; commonish words that are overrepresented here because of context, like ‘whence’, ‘obscure’, ‘adoption’, and ‘origin’; and generally very common words like ‘the’, ‘of’, and ‘is’. So what is the most common root sense in OED2 (1989)? It may be ‘stone’, […]

28.06.2012 – 17:40 | By D-AW | Posted in Dictionaries and Lexicography, Etymology, Linguistics | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Oxford English Dinner

Some OED entries badly need revising. A friend who teaches in Oxford just posted this to her Facebook status (I’ve noticed younger British academics in the midst of that end-of-year slow torture called ‘marking’ like to post little gems like this on social media for relief, or therapy): Most telling student error of the year: […]

07.06.2012 – 15:51 | By D-AW | Posted in Dictionaries and Lexicography, Linguistics, Society, Politics, Ethics | Tagged , | Comments (2)

Literally Etymologically

Etymologically, ‘literal’ means ‘Of, relating to, or of the nature of a letter, or the letters, of the alphabet’. To be precise about what I mean by ‘etymologically’ here, I’m referring to the earliest English use of word as recorded in OED3 (John Trevisa, a1398). I don’t mean the prior senses of Middle French literal, […]

11.04.2012 – 16:01 | By D-AW | Posted in Etymology, General, Linguistics, Society, Politics, Ethics | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Attributions and intertexts: ‘Wrinching and spraining the text’

Recently I posted about my idea to teach a computer to look for allusions to the Oxford English Dictionary in poems. A while ago I came across an instance of intertextual reference in a poem by Geoffrey Hill which illustrates really well several of the issues that arise when dealing with the OED, which is […]

04.04.2012 – 20:50 | By D-AW | Posted in Dictionaries and Lexicography, Digital Humanities, Poetry, Readings | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (0)

The OED in Poetry

Some poems mention looking etymologies up in the Oxford English Dictionary. Paul Muldoon’s “Cows” does this, near-rhyming ‘protestations of O.E.D.’ with ‘fade’ and ‘jade’ (the rhyme works best if you lexicalize the acronym and pronounce it with its preposition, like ‘of owed’). His “Hedge School” remembers ‘tracing the root of metastasis‘ in the New Shorter […]

03.04.2012 – 11:54 | By D-AW | Posted in Dictionaries and Lexicography, Digital Humanities, Etymology, Poetry | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

Poetical Lexicography

The OED was conceived as a dictionary ‘on historical principles’. The practice employed from the beginning was to illustrate the several sense definitions of a word over time with quotations from published material across the lifespan of that sense. Currently I’m engaged in trying to quantify the extent of poetical sense illustration in the OED.  […]

31.03.2012 – 14:31 | By D-AW | Posted in Dictionaries and Lexicography, Digital Humanities, Etymology, Linguistics, Poetry | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Poems in the OED

Computer scientists at the University of Waterloo were responsible for digitizing the Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (OED2), in the late 1980s. Initially available on CD-ROM, this eventually became the OED Online. The database has quickly replaced the printed dictionary as a first point of call for the word-curious, primarily because the extensive mark-up of […]

31.03.2012 – 08:59 | By D-AW | Posted in Dictionaries and Lexicography, Digital Humanities, Etymology, Linguistics, Poetry | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)