Sad news for those of us with fond memories of long minutes lost in the more arcane histories of English words: the third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, which a team of 80 lexicographers ...

Clarence Major, Dictionary of Afro-American Slang (1970), The Queen's Vernacular: A Gay Lexicon, San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books (1972), and Cheris Kramarae and Paula Treichler with Ann Russo, 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 ...

It took more than 70 years and tons of volunteer labor to create “the definitive record of the English language”—including an assist from a murderer. When the London Philological Society came up with ...

Once, every middle-class home had a piano and a dictionary. The purpose of the piano was to be able to listen to music before phonographs were available and affordable. Later on, it was to torture ...

There are few books in the world that most people have heard of. There are even fewer so recognizable that are 500,000 words long. The Oxford English Dictionary is the longest English variant of its ...

Noah Webster portrait, circa 1891. This post is in partnership with the History News Network, the website that puts the news into historical perspective. A version of the article below was originally ...

From Samuel Johnson to the Urban Dictionary, these supposedly sober reference works are often distinctly idiosyncratic. Here are some worth looking up The popular 18th-century lexicographer Nathaniel ...