Christmas or Yule: the lexicon of the holiday season

’Tis the season to be jolly,Fa-la-la-la-lah, la-la-la-lah. Ah, carols! Doesn’t everyone love them? They really lift our spirits: belting them out in company certainly gets me in the Christmas mood. I expect many of us will have a favourite. What’s yours? Hearing carols piped in shops or singing them… Read More

Omicron: What is it?

Alpha, Beta, Gamma…it’s all Greek to us. Quite literally, it’s the Greek alphabet. If you’ve watched the news or spent any time online lately, you might have heard the word omicron and wondered where it came from. In May 2021, the World Health Organisation (WHO) announced that COVID-19 variants would… Read More

Sue Atkins – pioneering lexicographer and linguist

Beryl T. Atkins, one of the founding editors of the Collins Robert French Dictionary, died in September 2021 at the age of 90. Always known to friends and colleagues as Sue Atkins, she first joined Collins Dictionaries as a freelance compiler in the mid-1960s. Over the next twenty years, working… Read More

Get your crypto at the ready: NFTs are big in 2021

The digital revolution continues apace, changing our culture, relationships and the way we do business. Facebook recently announced it would change its trading name to Meta to better reflect its interest in the metaverse, a concept that has been described “a dream for the future of… Read More
collinsdictionary