Back in 2013, as part of a quarterly online update, the Oxford Dictionary added the word "twerk" to its collection. The addition came after Miley Cyrus' widely discussed performance at the MTV Video ...
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Can the Dictionary Keep Up?

Books & the Arts / In Stefan Fatsis’s capacious, and at times score-settling, personal history of the reference book, he ...
From dropped words to fake definitions, learn fun facts, hearsay, and scandal about our most useful language resource, and the words that make it up. You might be surprised to learn what the most ...
SAN MATEO, Calif., March 2, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- English just installed a software update.
"Just how far removed we had already become from Britain even in the nineteenth century was not well understood in the mother country," begins an essay in the first pages of the Canadian Oxford ...
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 ...
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 ...
A dictionary is a list of words or phrases and their definitions (what they mean). Dictionaries are arranged in alphabetical order. They help you to spell or understand any new words, so are a ...
Dictionaries have been part of British life since at least 1604, when Robert Cawdrey’s A Table Alphabeticall was published. Containing around 3,000 words and their definitions, Cawdrey hoped it would ...