Social media plays a big role in this because thanks to it, everyone can share and adopt words from others language. Gen Z for example, has claimed many words that they use rather often.
MID, ICK, BUSSIN are some slang words you may notice in their jargon.
Words and variants of it are everywhere, its easy to get scrolling when you feel bored and every day you may notice some new hot ‘slang’ being used not only on social media but also on the booming word of Word Games.
Its funny that words themselves are rarely discussed, their etymology, how they evolved, how they adapted in various places/cities and so on. When one gets curious, the authorative place to check is The Oxford English Dictionary. The go-to place to get the most accurate definitions, its usage and context. Many people, especially those who play crossword puzzles daily, find themselves in search for definitions at OED.
How it started?
The OED’s history dates back nearly 140 years of which is characterized by a community-wide, global effort which spanned several decades for the good of the language.
Any Great Dictionary Has Humble Beginnings
The Oxford English Dictionary appeared in instalments that started on February 1, 1884. The first part of it contained the words that started with letter A. Sometime in the past, whenever the commencement of the project was announced, it was intended to be a smaller one.
In 1857, a paper was published by a committee of the Philological Society of London, the society concerned with the linguistic study of language. “It was challenged by existing English language dictionaries which were deficient, and a New English Dictionary would be compiled according to the OED website”.
The task was centered on the examination of literary works to find meanings and examples of words which were then shared with the content for its possible inclusion. Every word as well as the associations such as its meaning and origin would be recorded on tiny fragments of paper, which were called “slips” then.
Progression on the Project Eventually Skidded
The Oxford University Press finally accepted to publish the folio volumes in 1879. This, along with the hiring of a new editor by the name James Murray the previous year, was to bring a very considerable difference.
“Acting as editor of the Dictionary, he brought volunteer program back to life and set up a marginal staff working group.”
Murray had a peculiar route to becoming a member of the Philological association largely because he was of a non-elite background. Despite his education stopped at the age of 14, he would learn several languages and play a role of headmaster. He was bestowed by nine honors degrees, including Cambridge and Oxford, after he died in 1915.
Dedication: Murray Had a Shed Built Near His House for Dictionary Work
The volunteers stood in for every walk of life. Oglivie put it well when he concluded, “The tale is one of amateurs who are teaming up with academic elite in a period of time when academic scholarship was increasingly becoming professionalized. It is about women who count, but are excluded from institutions of higher learning. It is also a portrayal of hundreds of Americans who contributed to a Dictionary that everyone thinks is exclusively ‘British’.”
“Well, I was thrilled until I found out that my crime scene was not just one-murderer, but three! It did not get better when I found out that one of them was a porn-loving man, daughter of Karl Marx, the President of the Yale, the inventor of the tennis-net adjuster, and two lesbians who used to write under a male pen name…!” she summed JRR Tolkien the author of The Lord of The Rings, was the cog in the wheel of this scheme.
Besides Murray, other key members of the team included Henry Bradley and editors William Craigie (W) and Charles Onions (W). These eminent scholars would contribute to the speed of the work. In 1918, the last of the book was printed off.
“Instead of 6,400 pages in 4 volumes which had initially been planned, the Dictionary eventually became ten volumes with more than 250,000 main entries and almost 2,000,000 quotations. It was published under the looming name A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, with the nickname Oxford English Dictionary inherited along the way,” according to the webpage.
By Chris Bates
