Robert Charles Hope, inventor of the crank used to adjust the tension on a tennis net, is among thousands of readers who in the late 19th century responded to a call from the Oxford English Dictionary to send in citations for notable words they...
According to a centuries-old superstition, saying rabbit, rabbit as soon as you wake up on the first day of every month will supposedly ensure good luck. Variants of this phrase include white rabbit, or white rabbit, white rabbit, or simply rabbits...
Look up the verb comfort in the Oxford English Dictionary and you’ll see that in the 13th century, this word meant “to strengthen.” It comes from Latin fortis meaning “strong,” the source of fort, fortify, and forte...
Thanks to a project led by Professor Charlotte Brewer of Oxford University and research fellow Stephen Turton of Cambridge, you can now enjoy a trove of letters between James Augustus Henry Murray and his many correspondents during his work on what...
Melanie from San Antonio, Texas, uses the term janky to mean “not good ” or “not working well,” and in her family, they’ll jokingly use the term dejankify and dejankification to refer to washing their dog. The slang...
The editors of the Oxford English Dictionary recently added several Irish English terms. One of them is segotia, which means “friend.” There’s an entry for this word, also spelled segocia, in Grant’s own book, The Official...