When something’s in its heyday, its in its prime. What does that have to do with hay? Nothing, actually. It goes back to the 1500s, when heyday and similar-sounding words were simply expressions of celebration or joy. Grant is especially fond...
When it comes to marriage, you’ve got to work with your OH — that is, your other half. Lexicographers for the Oxford English Dictionary are tracking this initialism, as well as DH, or dear husband, for possible inclusion in future editions...
On the website Ask Metafilter, I answered a question about dictionaries that I want to elaborate on here. Metafilter user “Aswego” inquired: Is there some super-secret linguistics resource that sorts dictionaries by...
When I read this narrative about the making of the first edition of the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus by former coworker Erin McKean, I was reminded of something that happened. I was one of the book’s editors and worked with its...
On wordorigins.org, etymologist Dave Wilton is going through the Oxford English Dictionary year by year to find the earliest citations for various words, which offer an unusual linguistic glimpse into that particular year. The year 1937, for...
Dave Wilton’s wordorigins.org notes two Yiddish words with first citations from 1937 in the Oxford English Dictionary: bupkes, meaning nothing, and zaftig, also spelled zoftig, meaning big, plump, soft, or juicy. Bupkes may originally have referred...