A new database includes more than 850 dissertations and theses, spanning everything from baseball slang and cigarette smoking to postage stamps and ballpark organs.
Articles on Dictionary
Displaying all articles
The polar regions are cold, remote and off-putting, but there are thousands of polar words in English – and not just words for snow and ice.
Can you guess which languages score the highest for terms relating to ‘love’, ‘death’, ‘canoe’ or ‘sheep’? We made a tool to help you explore our extensive dataset.
A new climate dictionary is a quick and easy way to better understand key environmental jargon.
You know that thing with the name? the whatsamajig? the whozeewhatzit?
Pleasant-sounding words might have a leg up.
2023 will be remembered for more than quirky new phrases.
The road to becoming a champion speller is made easier with support from family and friends, but ultimately it depends on an individual student’s commitment to learning, a scholar writes.
The Warlpiri Dictionary has been 60 years in the making – and it’s shortlisted for the 2023 Australian Book Industry Awards, a rarity for a dictionary.
Updates to the Oxford English Dictionary provide a fascinating glimpse into how language changes in the face of rapid and unprecedented social and economic disruption.
The word ‘OK’ has only been around for 180 years, but it’s become the most spoken word on the planet.
A dictionary of African politics reveals the witty and insightful political terminology that people in different African countries use.
‘Milkshake duck’, a word created in 2016 on Twitter, is the Macquarie Dictionary Word of the Year. Efforts to coin new words have a long history and were particularly in vogue in the 1980s.
Here is a handful of extremely useful expressions with political application which have fallen by the wayside, but remain apt and adept today.
Our communications revolution is changing the way we write and speak, and ‘Slanglish’ has never had it so good.
Top contributors
-
Professor of Linguistics, Monash University
-
Roger J. Kreuz is a Friend of The Conversation.
Associate Dean and Feinstone Interdisciplinary Research Professor, University of Memphis
-
PhD Student in Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick
-
Professor of U.S. Immigration Studies, Amherst College
-
Professor emerita, Australian National University
-
Director of Slang and New Language Archive, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, King's College London
-
Senior Lecturer in English Language/Linguistics, University of Liverpool
-
Warlpiri Indigenous Knowledge Holder, Indigenous Knowledge
-
Professor of Democracy, University of Birmingham
-
Professor of English, Arizona State University
-
Distinguished Librarian, Penn State
-
DPhil Candidate, University of Oxford
-
Associate Professor of linguistics, Australian National University
-
Professor of Earth System Science, UCL
-
Senior Lecturer, Computing and Information Systems, The University of Melbourne