Will the venerable Oxford English Dictionary (OED) become a thing of the past? No, but it is likely to become incorporeal.
A spokesperson for Oxford University Press told the Oxford Times, in response to a story in the Telegraph contending the next edition of the OED will be all-digital, that “No decision has yet been made on the format of the third edition. It’s likely to be more than a decade before the full edition is published and a decision on format will be taken at that point. Lexicographers are currently preparing the third edition of the OED, which is 28 per cent complete. No final completion date is yet confirmed.”
[Read More]
Ernest Hemingway was a powerful, original writer and anyone who puts words to paper can benefit from learning about his writing style.
He was such an excellent writer that it is easy to get lost in his stories and forget to look at their construction. He is best known for The Sun Also Rises, For Whom the Bells Toll, The Old Man and the Sea, and The Snows of Kilimanjaro. He won the Nobel Prize for fiction in 1954.
[Read More]
Nothing demonstrates the change more than the fact that the publishers of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary has removed hyphens from 16,000 words in its latest edition. For the most part, the dictionary dropped hyphens from compound nouns, which were unified in a single word (e.g. pigeonhole) or split into two (e.g. test tube), according to a report by Reuters.
Is there a rule you can apply to know if words have been unified or split? Nope. You’ll need to look up each word in the two-volume Shorter Oxford English Dictionary to know for sure.
