OED Blog

> Why is there no OED app (just the Shorter one ... which is awful)? It's some combination of OUP wanting to push the Oxford Dictionary of English and OUP wanting to go on charging $100 a year for individual OED access https://public.oed.com/help/how-to-subscribe/ . Though indeed for that kind of money you might think you were owed an app instead of just a web interface. There can't yet be a free version because no edition of the OED is fully out of copyright yet ... not just yet, at least.

For full feature 'traditional' English the custodians are the Oxford English Dictionary and the BBC. Every once in a while, and with great fanfare, the BBC announce what new words have been deemed appropriate to add to the language. The OED have an archive of these updates for more recent times online. Not so long ago they would make you buy the actual dictionary to get this information so these 'updates' do not go that far back in time. Words have to be hoarded and protected, can't let anyone have them... https://public.oed.com/updates/ I believe Merriam-Webster had something to do with this rival 'simplified' English that has been popular across the pond since some incident involving tea in Boston. The real deal is obviously spelt out in the Oxford English Dictionary.

EDIT: Look at OED's additions list from June 2015, specifically under 'g': http://public.oed.com/the-oed-today/recent-updates-to-the-oed/june-201… 'gunna'. Is it still wrong? --original comment-- Common usage does eventually lead to validity, though. Language is not static and evolves through usage. Besides, how are you going to measure validity? Is the OED the sole arbiter of what's "correct"? Common usage and mutual understanding is a great way to determine what's "correct" in a language. I won't debate the legal usage of the word, as there was no mention of legal interpretation by the courts in the previous comments. However you are correct from a legal perspective where words have specific meanings.

> It is a bound. Yeah, that seems like a good way to think of it. > Shakespeare is often credited with inventing huge numbers of words, but it is more likely that he was just the first to get them into print, in a form that survived. That might be less true than someone might guess today. From ~1475, when the printing press arrived in the British Isles, through Shakespeare's time and until Samuel Johnson's dictionary of ~1755, is called the Early Modern period in English. During it was also the Reformation of the 16th century and the growth of science in the 17th century, and London's population doubling multiple times. Before that, Middle English was a backwater, a limited language not respected even in its own country. "Early in the period, English was frequently compared unfavourably as a literary language with Latin. It was also initially seen as not possessing advantages over other European language ...". [0] But early in Shakespeare's career: " ... there was a sudden change between 1570 and 1580. English began to be praised, in contrast with other languages, for its copious vocabulary, linguistic economy (in using words of mainly one or two syllables), and simple grammar." [0] "The vocabulary of English expanded greatly during the early modern period. Writers were well aware of this and argued about it. Some were in favour of loanwords to express new concepts, especially from Latin. Others advocated the use of existing English words, or new compounds of them, for…

Either you come from somewhere with extraordinarily talented elementary school students, or you are confusing the OED with a different similarly named work, perhaps the something from here https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/? The OED that's being referred to here is a 20+ volume set that costs about a thousand dollars: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-oxford-english-dictionary-… University libraries will probably have a copy or two, and I suppose some high school (9th-12th grade) libraries might have a single rarely consulted set, but I'm doubtful any elementary schools in the US have one. The best evidence I can give for its exclusiveness might be the link on the front page of the official OED site http://www.oed.com to the information about the print edition: http://public.oed.com/about/the-oed-in-print-and-on-cd-rom/. It goes to a page not found. Rather than being a standard companion book, apparently so few copies of this are sold that no one has bothered to fix the broken link!

I'm curious on what made it ungrammatical? I'm assuming you mean "they" used to not be singular? That somewhat surprises me, as I've never been distracted by talking about someone with the pronoun "they." Indeed, google tells me that singular "they" traces back to at least 1375? (https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they/ is a full article on it. Amusing and interesting history of the word.)

Never mind modern usage, OED traces it back to medieval English. https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they/

~600 years of historical English usage disagrees with you [1]. [1] https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they/

Singular they has been used for centuries. It isn't a top-down imposition, it's a natural development of English. It is, in fact, older than singular you. If anything, the pushback against singular they is the imposition by self-appointed language lords onto people they arbitrarily decided weren't speaking correctly https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they/

Are you referring to this reference? https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they/ What part is vague?

> "They" implies multiple No. It doesn't. The Oxford English Dictionary traces singular they back to 1375, where it appears in the medieval romance William and the Werewolf The New Oxford Dictionary of English (1998) not only accepts singular they, they also use the form in their definitions. And the New Oxford American Dictionary (Third Edition, 2010), calls singular they ‘generally accepted’ with indefinites, and ‘now common but less widely accepted’ with definite nouns, especially in formal contexts. https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they/ Please, learn English.

Agreed. That said, ‘they’ has been “on duty” as a singular pronoun since at least the 14th century https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they/#

> The Oxford English Dictionary traces singular they back to 1375, where it appears in the medieval romance William and the Werewolf. https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they/

> ‘They’ is universally recognised as a third-person plural pronoun… The "singular they" has been in use since the 1300s. https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they/

Singular "they" predates singular "you" [1]. If someone tells you otherwise, tell them they are wrong. That use of "them" as in the previous sentence has been correct for centuries. [1] https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they/

> grammatically silly https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they/

Language changes slowly but constantly: words evolve new sentences, new phrases are coined, others become less current. The OED is so big that the only practical way to revise it is continuously, a few entries at a time. Every quarter there are hundreds of changes: https://public.oed.com/updates/ . As with software, it turns out that financing a product that needs continuous updates is more effectively done with a subscription than by selling products as one-off transactions. (FWIW the print version of the 2nd edition OED is 20 volumes and is listed on the OED site at 860 quid.)

Singular "they" is not recent at all. The earliest recorded usage of this form is from 1375 C.E., according to the Oxford English Dictionary. Further reading: https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they/

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, singular "they" has a long history going back to 1375. https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they/ With a little googling you can verify that Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and Chaucer all used it.

People have been using singular they since at least 1375. https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they/#

Without any context, Apple’s Dictionary lookup serves up the definition of “cromulent” from both OED and New OED entries. It was apparently added in 2017 according to a Reddit thread, and in 2018 according to this list: https://public.oed.com/updates/new-words-list-june-2018/ Merriam-Webster added “embiggen” but declined to add “cromulent”: https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-43298229

Sinograph is the term I’ve seen used in many introductory texts on Japanese. Apparently it was added just this month to the Oxford English Dictionary. https://public.oed.com/updates/new-words-list-march-2021/

80s in Australia too, been hearing/using it my whole life. Though with respect to 'ages' apparently it's been around since at least the 14th century but certain purists tried to stamp it out at various times (just like the singular 'you' which no one currently has grammatical issues with I hope). https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they/

Historically understood to be plural by you. Actual-historically, from 1375, not so much. https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they/

"The Oxford English Dictionary traces singular they back to 1375" https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they/

I understand your pain, but I did the right thing. I used to do as you suggest but my message is a good example of the sexism problem as it would imply the stereotype of the dumb female humanities major. The singular “they” has a long history.* Yes, words change (“elite”, “peas”, and even “you” as the article points out). But I think it is past time to put the tyranny of a prescriptivist plural-restricted “they” to bed. https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they/

https://public.oed.com/blog/march-2014-update-new-words-notes/ The phrase dead white male (abbreviated DWM), has been used since the mid-1980s as a term of disparagement for male authors and academics of European ancestry whose pre-eminence, especially in academic study, is challenged as being disproportionate to their cultural significance, and attributed to a historical bias in favour of their gender and ethnicity.

Not entirely. For many centuries singular ‘they’ had been used when gender is uncertain or unknown. In the last hundred years or so some (primarily American) language teachers decided that singular ‘they’ was wrong and adopted ‘he/she’. See https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they/ for a history.

Cromulent made the OED last year: https://public.oed.com/updates/new-words-list-june-2018/