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37 per cent of my favourite things
Have you ever wondered what proportion of words are nouns, verbs, prepositions, adjectives and adverbs? According to the word specialists at Oxford Dictionaries, The Second Edition of the Oxford...
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Tweetolife: visualising gender differences in language
Michael Rundell, a lexicographer at Macmillan Dictionary, wrote last year about a new area of linguistic research “based not on conventional corpora, but on Twitter feeds”. The demo website he linked...
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Would of, could of, might of, must of
When we say would have, could have, should have, must have, might have, may have and ought to have, we often put some stress on the modal auxiliary and none on the have. We may show this in writing by...
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Google’s Ngram Viewer and wild treacle
I have two new posts up at Macmillan Dictionary Blog. If you subscribe to it, or follow me on Twitter, you may already’ve seen them, in which case please indulge or disregard. The first is a report on...
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ETAOIN SRHLDCU, or: What are the most common words and letters in English?
Most of us know that ‘e’ is the most common letter in English and the is the most common word. Many are familiar with ETAOIN SHRDLU, the nonsense string that used to appear in print because of...
View Article‘Cuckquean’, abbreviations, and vocabulary change
Catching up on my column for Macmillan Dictionary Blog, I have three recent posts to share. Golly, matey – vocabulary change is massively awesome looks at how the words we use reflect our shifting...
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