“World Wide Words” for Folks Who Are REALLY into Words…

World Wide Words is a WebSite/Service that, ironically, only deals with English words.

Image Courtesy of Brenton Nicholls ~ http://www.freeimages.com/photographer/BJN-31210

Though, the Site’s subtitle is, Investigating the English language across the globe.

I’d linked to World Wide Words in a post back in March of last year called, Some Very Cool WebSites for #Readers & #Writers, which also linked to five other wonderful word-sites…

In that post, I included these words from the World Wide Words Site:

“The English language is forever changing. New words appear; old ones fall out of use or alter their meanings. World Wide Words tries to record at least a part of this shifting wordscape by featuring new words, word histories, words in the news, and the curiosities of native English speech.”

But, that’s all that was said about the site in that post…

Here are a few excerpts from the page about the founder of the site, Michael Quinion (the whole Bio is fascinating…):

“After Cambridge University, where he studied physical sciences, he joined BBC radio as a studio manager.”

“After [two other positions] he returned to working for himself, writing scripts for exhibitions, taking on a freelance curatorial role, creating audio-visual programmes…”

“After illness forced him to take early retirement, he turned to his lifelong love of the English language. Yet another chance encounter led him to become a freelance reader for the Oxford English Dictionary, between 1992 and 2016 supplying more than 175,000 examples of English usage old and new. He also compiled a third of the entries for the second edition of the Oxford Dictionary of New Words. In 1996, he took advantage of spare space on his son’s website to begin posting articles on language. This soon evolved into the World Wide Words website and its associated newsletter. More than 900 issues have appeared.”

You can scan all the newsletters…

Since the bulk of information resides in his newsletters, I’ll reproduce a bit of the December, 2016 issue:

Contents

1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Not my pigeon.
3. Subnivean.
4. Black as Newgate knocker.
5. In the news.
6. Boxing Day.

From the article, Not my pigeon:

Q: From Helen Mosback: I have just read a serialised version of John Rowland’s Calamity in Kent. It includes this: “In fact, it’s your pigeon, as they say in the civil service.” I was wondering if you could shed any light on the expression it’s your pigeon? I have to admit to being quite taken by the Polish expression not my circus, not my monkeys to indicate that something is not one’s problem, and would be very happy should I have found an equally enchanting English expression!

A: Readers may not be familiar with John Rowland, a little-known and neglected British detective-story writer who published Calamity in Kent in 1950. The British Library has republished it this year in its Crime Classics series.

The date of his book is significant, since at that time the expression was more familiar to people in the countries of what is now the Commonwealth than it is now. It had come into the language around the end of the nineteenth century.

The idiom suggests something is the speaker’s interest, concern, area of expertise or responsibility. This is a recent British example:

If posh people aren’t your pigeon, the correspondence on display in this book will be a massive bore and irritation.

The Times, 8 Oct. 2016.

It also turns up in the negative in phrases such as “that’s not my pigeon”, denying involvement or responsibility in some matter.

There’s quite a bit more of this article on the site…

And, from the article, In the news:

Oxford Dictionaries announced its Word of the Year 2016 on 16 November: post-truth. Its editors defined this as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” One example came in a report in The Times on 31 October of comments by the president of the European Council on the signing of a trade deal with Canada: “Mr Tusk also denounced the ‘post-truth politics … on both sides of the Atlantic’ which nearly scuppered the deal because ‘facts and figures won’t stand up for themselves’ against an emotional opposition campaign.” Though it has been very much a word of this year, connected both with the Brexit referendum in the UK and the US presidential election, Oxford Dictionaries noted that “post-truth seems to have been first used in this meaning in a 1992 essay by the late Serbian-American playwright Steve Tesich in The Nation magazine.”

Again, there’s more of this article on the site…

Finally, if you’re wordly-adventurous, you can call up a Random Page…
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“Wordnik Is Looking for a Million Missing Words—Can You Help?”

The title of this post was the subject line of an email I got yesterday. 

Wordnik is an online dictionary/thesaurus; and, if you didn’t know, a thesaurus is what shows you the synonyms of words. And, Wordnik also shows you a word’s etymology—its word-history…

Or, in their own words, “…we’re the world’s biggest and friendliest English dictionary.”

Then, they told me:

“This is just a quick email to let you know that Wordnik launched a Kickstarter campaign today!”

Before I share about the Kickstarter campaign, I should let Wordnik tell you a bit more about itself:

“Every word at Wordnik gets its own full page, with as much data shown as possible: a standard definition (if one already exists), example sentences; synonyms, antonyms, and other related words; space for community-added tags, lists, and comments; images from Flickr and tweets from Twitter; and statistics on usage, including how many times a word has been favorited, listed, tagged, commented-upon, and, of course, whether or not it’s valid in Scrabble (and how many points it scores).”

And, here’s more about the Kickstarter campaign:

“We want to find a million words that haven’t been included in major English dictionaries and give them each a home on the Internet.

“At Wordnik we believe that every word of English deserves to be lookupable!

“The internet is, for all practical purposes, infinite. Wordnik can and should include every English word that’s ever been used.”

Why?

“Every word deserves a recorded place in our language’s history. We want to collect, preserve, and share every word of English, and provide a place where people can find, learn, annotate, comment on, and argue about every word.

“If you want to know more about a word—any word!—we want to help you find the information you need. If you’re curious about a word, why should you have to wait until someone else decides that a word is worth knowing?”

And, in case you need even more reason to go check out the Kickstarter campaign:

“We already have all these words in English! They exist right now in articles, books, blog posts, and even tweets. But they’ve never all been recorded in one place where they can be discovered and loved.

“Have you ever felt that the right word was out there, but you just couldn’t find it?

“Have you ever learned a weird word that made your whole day? Perhaps a word like thoil, which means ‘to be able to justify the expense of a purchase’? Or pandiculation, which means ‘yawning and stretching (as when first waking up)’?”

Here’s Wordnik’s Kickstarter link again :-)
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A Great Place for Writers (And, Readers) To Buy Professional Books

Quoted from the March post, How Do Words Get Into A Dictionary?:

“I subscribe to the Oxford Dictionary Pro but their free online edition of the Oxford Dictionary is good, too.

“Naturally, the dictionary is managed by the University of Oxford—”It is the oldest university in the English-speaking world, and the second-oldest surviving university in the world.”

“Oxford actually has 58 different services you can subscribe to…”

They also have a Book Store.

Here are the categories:

• Personal Subscriptions
  • • Arts & Humanities
    • Dictionaries & Reference
    • Medicine & Health

  Social Sciences

Those are from the USA site.

If you want a different country, go here and click on the little flag, then enter your country :-)

There’s one particular selection I’m drooling over (maybe someday I can afford it…):

Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary

With Additional Material from A Thesaurus of Old English

Edited by Christian Kay, Jane Roberts, Michael Samuels, and Irené Wotherspoon

• A unique thesaurus resource – the very first historical thesaurus to be compiled for any of the world’s languages
• The largest thesaurus resource in the world, covering more than 920,000 words and meanings from Old English to the present day based, on the Oxford English Dictionary
• Synonyms listed with dates of first recorded use in English, in chronological order, with earliest synonyms first
• Uses a thematic system of classification, with synonyms and related words forming part of a detailed semantic hierarchy
• Comprehensive index enables complete cross-referencing of nearly one million words and meanings
• Contains a comprehensive sense inventory of Old English
• Includes a free fold-out color chart which shows the top levels of the classification structure
• Made up of two volumes: The main text, comprising numbers sections for semantic categories, and the index, comprising a full A-Z look up of nearly one million lexical items

* Hardcover
* 3952 Pages
* 8 3/4 x 11 1/4 inches
$495.00

So…

Go on over and find a few books that are within your budget :-)
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My Favorite Word is “Word” :-)

I started experimenting with words as a child—harmless activity that had some social benefit.

Now, I’m totally addicted to words and, worst of all, I’ve actually become an author, selling words to others…

So, with that tongue-in-cheek opening to this post, is my favorite word really “word”?

Yes!

As a child, I was an avid dictionary reader and swiftly moved on to Etymologies. And, when you look up the word-history of “word” you find it traced back to, well… back to speech, talk, utterance, and… word!

This self-reflective quality of the word “word” has always made it my favorite.

If you want another perspective on the relationships of words, you could follow the blog, Inky Fool, by Mark Forsyth.

Mark also turned some of his blog into the book, The Etymologicon.

Here’s the elevator pitch from GoodReads:

“The Etymologicon springs from Mark Forsyth’s Inky Fool blog on the strange connections between words. It’s an occasionally ribald, frequently witty and unerringly erudite guided tour of the secret labyrinth that lurks beneath the English language, taking in monks and monkeys, film buffs and buffaloes, and explaining precisely what the Rolling Stones have to do with gardening.”

And, as a favor to my best friend, who’s Australian, here’s Mark explaining the word “Barracking”…

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What *Is* The Right Word, Anyway?

Whether you’re a writer looking for the right word or a reader wondering what that particular word means, dictionaries can be handy.

Still, dictionaries have been mere snapshots of an ever-changing language…

In the previous post, Dictionary Evangelist, there was an entertaining video of lexicographer, Erin McKean, who thought it was important to have a dictionary to which words could be continually added. Do checkout her creation, Wordnik, and add a few words :-)

I use a free program called WordWeb on my computer (the standard program  is only for PCs ~ the Apps cover Mac, Android and Windows). It lets me check spelling and meaning by highlighting any word in any program or web page and clicking a couple keys, voila! Also, they have add-on dictionaries!

And, if you want to trace the historical meanings and roots of words, even though many dictionaries have some of that, you might use an Etymology Dictionary.

Speaking of history, and staying with English, there is the famous dictionary of Samuel Johnson from 1755.

Care to share any really strange words with us in the comments?

Have any words you’ve created that you’d like to see in the language?

Any words you think should be banned?
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