ian brookes

A clown fish

Sleepers – how a word can suddenly find fame!

When we think about new words coming into the dictionary, we often assume that the gap between a word being invented and being added to the dictionary is relatively short. However, a couple of interesting words that were recently selected for the dictionary have taken a long time to find… Read More
An open book with letters coming out of it

Divided by a Common Language

Two expressions submitted to the website caught my eye for the same reason recently. One of these was the adjective ‘kick-arse’, submitted by an Australian user, and the other was the idiomatic phrase ‘preach to the choir’, submitted by a user in the United… Read More
shelves of old leather-bound books

Thinking Outside the Dictionary

A user of this website recently left a comment asking why we had chosen to mark as ‘rejected’ a word that another user had submitted. After all, the word had been invented and used by that person, so surely it should be included in the… Read More