Clarence Major, Dictionary of Afro-American Slang (1970), The Queen's Vernacular: A Gay Lexicon, San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books (1972), and Cheris Kramarae and Paula Treichler with Ann Russo, A ...

The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary, by Sarah Ogilvie (Knopf, 370 pp., $30) Recently, I had a friend to lunch in New York and when I showed him my study, ...

Since the 1960s, the reference book has cataloged how people actually use language, not how they should. That might be changing. An Object Lesson. That symbolic importance is summed up in the phrase ...

In Borrowed Words: A History of Loanwords in English, I examine how words borrowed from different languages have influenced English throughout its history. The above feature summarizes some of the ...

Once, every middle-class home had a piano and a dictionary. The purpose of the piano was to be able to listen to music before phonographs were available and affordable. Later on, it was to torture ...

The lexicographer Kory Stamper’s new book, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries, is an eloquent defense of a “live and let live” approach to English. Well, you know what they say about ...