The Time the Oxford English Dictionary Forgot a Word

From Mental Floss –

When the complete edition of what would become the Oxford English Dictionary debuted in 1928, it was lauded as a comprehensive collection of the English language, a glossary so vast—and so thorough—that no other reference book could ever exceed its detail or depth. In total, the project took seven decades to catalogue everything from A to Z, defining a total of 414,825 words. But in the eyes of its editor James Murray, the very first volume of the dictionary was something of an embarrassment: It was missing a word.

Continue reading HERE.

13 Little-Known Punctuation Marks [info-graphic]

Mental_floss posted an info-graphic, that outlined a few punctuation marks that could be useful, if they gained acceptance.

Check out the info-graphic HERE.

Mental_floss post

How Far Back In Time Could You Go And Still Understand English? [video]

Contronyms – Words That Are Their Own Opposites [video]

25 Words For Other Words

This article, from Mental_floss, concerns 25 are rarely used words that describe unusual parts of the English language. I must admit that nearly every item on this list were unknown to me. Even after reading the explanation, I’m not sure what a troponym is (WordPress’s spell check doesn’t recognize it either). Word nerds will love the article.

Read the article HERE.

 

 

 

Defining “The” – Is It Possible?

This short article from mental_floss attempts to define the word “the”. After reading the article, I still feel that the word hasn’t been well defined, if that is even possible.

It’s the most frequent word in the English language, accounting for around 4 percent of all the words we write or speak. It’s everywhere, all the time, so clearly it must be doing something important. Words have meaning. That’s fundamental, isn’t it? So this word “the,” a word that seems to be supporting a significant portion of the entire weight of our language, what does this word mean? It must mean something, right?

continue reading HERE

 

 

Australian Proposes New Letter For Alphabet

Buzzfeed reports that Paul Mathis, an Australian restaurateur, has a new symbol that can replace the word “the”. Interesting idea; don’t think it will happen in the next ten years.

Read about it HERE and HERE

 

12 Letters That Didn’t Make The Alphabet

Mental_floss reports –

You know the alphabet. It’s one of the first things you’re taught in school. But did you know that they’re not teaching you all of the alphabet? There are quite a few letters we tossed aside as our language grew, and you probably never even knew they existed.

Read about forgotten letters such as; Long S, Wynn, Yogh, Ethel and 8 others, HERE

 

Double Contractions – I Didn’t Know About Them

I recently found this Wiktionary page listing Double Contractions. Additional investigation indicates that they are considered correct usage, at least in certain situations (such as dialogue). Who knew?

Double contractions are those words which contain two contractional clitics, such as n’t and ’ve. Both contractions are marked with apostrophes. Such as – shouldn’t’ve.

 

19 Words Without Rhymes

According to MentalFloss –

Rappers and poets take note: Most people have heard there are no words that rhyme with “orange.” But according to Dictionary.com, there are 19 words in the English language that have no perfect rhyme. Related Fact: The words are angst, bulb, cusp, film, gulf, kiln, oblige, opus, orange, pint, plankton, rhythm, silver, yttrium, depth, breadth, width, month and glimpsed. Can you think of any they missed? Or can you find a perfect rhyme for one of these 19?

original source