Oxford, moi

Oxford dictionary adds hundreds of new words, including 'carbon footprint'

1 day ago (Sept. 20)

LONDON - Carbon footprint, green audit and Chelsea tractor are among the raft of environmental terms being added to the latest Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.

The sixth edition of the dictionary, an abridged version of the Oxford English Dictionary, includes 2,500 new words that have been added since the last edition was published in 2002.

It is being published Thursday in United States and Britain, and will be shipped to Canadian bookstores in the first week of October.

In the new edition, "carbon footprint" is defined as the amount of greenhouse gas emissions an individual is responsible for, while a "green audit" is an inspection of a company to define its impact on the environment. "Chelsea tractor" is a British slang term for a gas-guzzling sport utility vehicle.

The additions also include "carbon-neutral," achieving a zero level of carbon dioxide emissions, and "emissions trading," selling or buying permits handed to nations or businesses to emit a certain level of carbon dioxide.

"Suddenly people have become much more concerned in climate change," said Angus Stevenson, the edition's editor. "It's trendy to be green, and that has made the vocabulary of green issues much more widespread."

The influx of new phrases has followed the scrapping of a rule that a word must appear five times in five published sources over five years, Stevenson said. Editors now use their discretion to decide on a new word's merit.

Other new terms are "manbag," a male handbag; "yummy mummy," an attractive mother; and phrases like "less is more," "the new black" and "take a chill pill."

"You could say there are two kinds of new words," Stevenson said. "There are new items of technology and new slang words that everybody is using."

New words imported from foreign languages are often food related, including "churro" (a Spanish fried dessert), "kheer" (an Indian dessert of rice and sweet milk), "pastilla" (a Moroccan pigeon pie), "pho" (a type of Vietnamese soup) and "tataki" (Japanese raw or slightly seared meat or fish).

The new edition, just two volumes compared with the full Oxford English Dictionary's 28 volumes, also includes 1,300 new quotations from authors.

Stevenson said words in common use since 1700 are included in the dictionary, while most of those which became obsolete before that date are omitted - except words used in the Bible and the works of William Shakespeare, John Milton and Geoffrey Chaucer.

- Associated Press

Grant Hogarth <rowan@inconnect.com> wrote:

Oh, the hyphen-ity!!!

Grant
============================
Thousands of hyphens perish as English marches on
Fri Sep 21, 2007 10:57 AM ET
By Simon Rabinovitch
http://tinyurl.com/2oqquz

LONDON (Reuters) - About 16,000 words have succumbed to pressures of the Internet age and lost their hyphens in a new edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.

Bumble-bee is now bumblebee, ice-cream is ice cream and pot-belly is pot belly.

And if you've got a problem, don't be such a crybaby (formerly cry-baby).

The hyphen has been squeezed as informal ways of communicating, honed in text messages and emails, spread on Web sites and seep into newspapers and books.

"People are not confident about using hyphens anymore, they're not really sure what they are for," said Angus Stevenson, editor of the Shorter OED, the sixth edition of which was published this week.

Another factor in the hyphen's demise is designers' distaste for its ungainly horizontal bulk between words.

"Printed writing is very much design-led these days in adverts and Web sites, and people feel that hyphens mess up the look of a nice bit of typography," he said. "The hyphen is seen as messy looking and old-fashioned."

The team that compiled the Shorter OED, a two-volume tome despite its name, only committed the grammatical amputations after exhaustive research.

"The whole process of changing the spelling of words in the dictionary is all based on our analysis of evidence of language, it's not just what we think looks better," Stevenson said.

Researchers examined a corpus of more than 2 billion words, consisting of full sentences that appeared in newspapers, books, Web sites and blogs from 2000 onwards.

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).

But hyphens have not lost their place altogether. The Shorter OED editor commended their first-rate service rendered to English in the form of compound adjectives, much like the one in the middle of this sentence.

"There are places where a hyphen is necessary," Stevenson said. "Because you can certainly start to get real ambiguity."

Twenty-odd people came to the party, he said. Or was it twenty odd people?

Some of the 16,000 hyphenation changes in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, sixth edition:

Formerly hyphenated words split in two:

fig leaf

hobby horse

ice cream

pin money

pot belly

test tube

water bed

Formerly hyphenated words unified in one:

bumblebee

chickpea

crybaby

leapfrog

logjam

lowlife

pigeonhole

touchline

waterborne



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