Friday, October 19, 2007

The origins of new words

An article in today's Independent follows up the story from earlier in the year about the Oxford English Dictionary's quest to find word origins by getting the public to help. This exercise in democratic etymology has proved pretty successful, with earlier than previously recorded citations for expressions like "Daft as a brush", "der-brain" and "the dog's bollocks" making appearances.

More here: Independent article

Useful for:
ENA5 - Language Change

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