The eleventh edition of the Concise
Oxford English Dictionary has been fully revised, updated, and redesigned, as is appropriate for the first Concise of the 21st century. The dictionary contains more than 240,000 words, phrases, and meanings, of which almost 2,000 are new to this edition.
The new entries give us a snapshot of life in 2004. The news is filled with talk of gangmasters, the congestion charge, sky marshals, and health tourism; pole dancing, bookcrossing, and speed dating are the things that entertain us; football matches can end in handbags, and bumsters are popular with middle youth and metrosexuals. And, of course, if we want to make something seem more interesting we sex it up.
The Concise also says croeso (welcome) to some Welsh words with bore da (good morning) and iechyd da (good health) joining thousands of words from all around the
English-speaking world: dicky (car boot) and batchmate (classmate) from India, spinny (mad, crazy) from Canada, and bloviate (talk at length in an inflated or empty way) from America.
Features new to this edition include a greatly increased number of boxed
usage notes, offering help with tricky questions of
English. There are also around a hundred special Word Histories, which trace the stories of some of the language's most interesting words. For example, did you know that cloud originally meant 'hill'? A gossip was a godfather or godmother, a lady was someone who made bread, and the original Tories were outlaws or robbers. Also (lexicographers love this one), the
words grammar and glamour are linked!
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