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 ...

Tottenham Hotspur’s protests about the OED’s definition of the Y-word may be understandable, but are misplaced Protests against dictionaries are nothing new. In the 1960s, distaste for the treatment ...

Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time. To compile a dictionary of nearly every word in the English language was an endeavor typical of Victorian times, complete with ...

A Q&A with Kory Stamper, an editor at Merriam-Webster and author of ’Word By Word,’ on profanity, and the politics of language Kory Stamper, an editor at Merriam-Webster and one of the dictionary ...

"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 ...

We see Webster’s Dictionary in every classroom and every household, but we give no thought of the man who actually made this dictionary a reality. Noah Webster grew up in the small colonial town in ...

Without a blush, Publisher Bennett Cerf predicted last week that while Samuel Johnson was the great lexicog rapher of the 18th century and Noah Webster of the 19th, Random House will be the best of ...

Generations ago, most Canadian Inuit lived in small seasonal camps but, over the past 60 years, Inuit have settled into permanent towns, where traditional dialects intermingled and sometimes developed ...