GDPR, yanny/laurel & MadaBaka Beat: May’s Words in the News

Greetings. I have really enjoyed informing you about new and trending vocabulary in the news and social media over the past few years. However, new data regulations are coming into effect, and these will change what data I can retain and how I can use it. So if you would… Read More

Ruby Chocolate, Fatberg & Right to be Forgotten: April’s Words in the News

There’s a new chocolate in town: ruby chocolate, also called the “fourth chocolate” (after the milk, dark, and white varieties). From April, chocolate aficionados in the UK could buy it in the form of the Ruby KitKat. But what is ruby chocolate? It looks like white chocolate that has… Read More

The etymology behind 4 eggs-ellent Springtime words

With the wreckage of many chocolate eggs behind us and some spring weather finally on the horizon, you might wonder where this tradition of sharing brightly wrapped sweet treats and talking about giant benevolent bunnies comes from? We’ve explored the diverse etymology of 4 eggs-ellent words associated with spring. Read More

Up Lit, Alexa Laugh & Meet Me at McDonald’s Hair: March’s Words In The News

Well, it’s too bad I put Beast from the East in last month’s blog, because not only has it continued to cause disruption in March, it even brought a sequel: Beast from the East 2.0 or the Mini-Beast from the East. Like so many sequels, the Mini-Beast suffered from the… Read More

COBUILD: The Evolving Corpus. How corpus use has changed over the years

Size matters when it comes to corpora. At 220 million words of text, the corpus used to create the second edition of the COBUILD dictionary in 1995 was over ten times the size of the one used for the first edition, and 220 times bigger than the first electronic corpora… Read More

COBUILD: Shifting senses. How meanings of words have changed over the last 30 years

In the 30 years since the publication of the first COBUILD dictionary, a whole flurry of new words has come into the language and as they’ve caught on and become part of everyday usage, they’ve been added to the dictionary. I’m not just talking about the trendy new coinages that… Read More

COBUILD: The Early Years: Part 2. A dictionary from a corpus

By the time I arrived at COBUILD as part of the 1993 intake recruited to work on the second edition of the dictionary, the whole project had been fully computerised for several years. This meant working on screen at terminals linked to mainframe computers that hummed away in a separate… Read More

COBUILD Design and Layout: Changes over the last 30 years

Where were you 30 years ago? I was in the middle of my university studies, still to embark on my ELT career, and as such, a smidgin too late to be part of the intrepid and free-spirited COBUILD dictionary team. Led by the late John Sinclair, this large young team… Read More

COBUILD: The Early Years: Part 1. Where it all began

I have always counted myself as incredibly fortunate to have worked as part of the COBUILD team at the time that I did, between October 1983 and the end of 1986. I was not quite 24 when I arrived in Birmingham, not knowing one end of a dictionary definition from… Read More