Summer Reading, Reading Lists X
The folks who manage the Oxford English Dictionary have announced the new inclusions for the dictionary which include woke, post truth, and zyzzyza…I’ll leave it to you to “look these up.”
My use of the word manage is not unintentional, the OED is not entirely online, though, one can still see, use, worship the twenty volume print edition (the last print edition produced) in the ODY Reference Area. We have a wonderful collection of dictionaries in ODY and Launders, on the vocabulary of topics professional, on languages modern and antique, and on the main level of ODY we have dictionaries, still, on lecterns. Look up a word on a lectern-borne dictionary, it’s an experience.
We also have a great collection of books about dictionaries, so by way of home-grown list, I’d like to recommend the following for 4th of July reading:
- Caught in the Web of Words James A. H. Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary by K. M. Elisabeth Murray
- Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries by Kory Stamper
- Lost for Words: the Hidden History of the Oxford English Dictionary by Lynda Mugglestone
- Reading the OED: One man, One year, 21,730 Pages by Ammon Shea
- Empire of Words : the Reign of the OED by John Willinsky
- Noah Webster and the American Dictionary by David Micklethwait
- The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary by Peter Gilliver, Jeremy Marshall, and Edmund Weiner
- The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester
Good stuff. I’m off the Maine for a few days, and will pick up again with a new reading list on July 6th. Enjoy the 4th…