On the Record

First usages of words according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

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Charts & Graphs

Reform Movements

Successful attempts at linguistic overhaul.

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Charts & Graphs

Treasured Up

Libraries from around the world and throughout time.

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Preamble

Word Order

By Lewis H. Lapham

The Internet is blessed with undoubtedly miraculous applications, but language is not yet one of them. Technology cannot displace the primacy of words.

Essay

In the Panthéon

By Philipp Blom

History is written by the victors. So, too, in the world of ideas. Phillipp Blom on a group of thinkers far more daring than those enshrined in the Panthéon.

Essay

Word for Word

By Ben Zimmer

Peter Mark Roget’s Thesaurus was the creation of an obsessive list-maker that became a tool and a temptation for generations of writers.

Dictionary of American Regional English fieldworkers with Frederic G. Cassidy.

Essay

Native Tongues

By Simon Winchester

The making of the Dictionary of American Regional English, a five-thousand-page, five-volume book documenting the history of American slang.

Voices In Time

2008 | New York City

Last Stand

Nicholson Baker tries to stop Wikipedia deletions.More

Miscellany

Papal indulgences were brisk business for early printers, since they were single sheets and the type did not need to be reset. Between 1498 and 1500, the Benedictine monastery in Catalonia commissioned more than 200,000 indulgences from printers in the area. A total of two thousand single-sheet items survive from the whole of the fifteenth century; over one-third are indulgences.