Diversion: 4. a. spec. The turning away of the thoughts, attention, etc., from fatiguing or sad occupations, with implication of pleasurable excitement; distraction, recreation, amusement, entertainment. The Oxford English Dictionary 2nd edition.

AskOxford.com

A lexicographer's delight. Includes a word of the day; quote of the week; proverb of the week; quotations; sound bites; guide to family history; literary jargon buster; guide to better writing; word games; information about world English; collective terms for animals; frequently asked questions about grammar, spelling, symbols and word origins; the history of Scrabble; notes from the archives; a place to ask questions of the experts; and basic facts about and recent additions to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Balderdash & Piffle

For the second series of BBC TWO's Balderdash & Piffle, the Oxford English Dictionary asked for public assistance to help them trace the history of 40 well-known words and phrases. From 'identity theft' to 'pole dance', Balderdash & Piffle's wordhunters stopped at nothing to do their bit for the English language. Thanks to an outstanding response from the public, OED's editors rewrote the entries for 27 of the 40 words on the Wordhunt list.
This page has links to the final results and also to new contributions to the Wordhunt quest.

English accents and dialogues

The British Library has assembled a unique digital collection that allows researchers to examine the evolution of spoken English. The collection includes 288 pairs of digital recordings: half were made by linguists at the University of Leeds between 1950 and 1961 and each is paired with another recording made by the BBC in 1998-1999 as part of an oral history project.
Each extract is accompanied by a short content summary and brief notes drawing attention to the most salient features of the speaker's dialect.

Your language needs you!

John Simpson, Chief Editor of the Oxford English Dictionary:
'I would like to invite readers to contribute to the development of the Dictionary by adding to our record of English throughout the world.'
One hundred and twenty years ago, James Murray, original editor of the OED, launched an 'Appeal to the English-Speaking and English-Reading Public of Great Britain, America and the British Colonies' for words for the Dictionary. From Minnesota to Melbourne, scholars and readers came to Murray's aid. Since that time, many more people have made valuable contributions to the Dictionary. They have been of all ages and from all walks of life (among them writers, teachers, a stevedoring superintendent, a Nobel laureate, a retired businessman, a cryptographer, and, perhaps most famously, Dr William C. Minor, inmate of Broadmoor Asylum).
Information on how to contribute and a submission form are provided.

The full Monty

The 1998 Foundations of Linguistics III Library exercise asked students to follow up the expression 'the full Monty'. This proved to be quite a quite tricky question, but Michael Quinion's language pages World Wide Words gave us the answer...
Arriving too late for the exercise, the new edition of The Oxford dictionary of new words (in the Barr Smith Library's Reference collection at call number 423 T921o.2) also provides a definition of 'the full Monty'.
If you want more diversions along these lines, a visit to World Wide Words is thoroughly recommended. The site is devoted to the English language - its history, quirks, curiosities and evolution.

Numbers from 1 to 10 in over 4500 languages

Just what it says -- how to count from one to ten in thousands of different languages. You can choose from a list of language groups or use a clickable map.

Bell Laboratories Projects: Text-to-Speech system

The Bell Labs Text-to-Speech system (TTS) has various applications such as reading electronic mail messages and generating spoken prompts in voice response systems. You can have a bit of fun with this site -- for example, you can type in some text and ask for it to be read back to you in Pig-Latin.

The Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights

Ratified at a meeting in Barcelona from 6 to 9 June 1996.

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This page was created and is maintained by Alan Keig