"Brimming with intelligence and personality, a vastly entertaining account of how dictionaries are made - a must read for word mavens. Have you ever tried to define the word "is?" Do you have strong feelings about the word (and, yes, it is a word) "irregardless?" Did you know that OMG was first used in 1917, in a letter to Winston Churchill? These are the questions that keep lexicographers up at night. While most of us might take dictionaries for...

Peter Martin recounts the patriotic fervor in the early American republic to produce a definitive national dictionary that would rival Samuel Johnson's 1755 Dictionary of the English Language. But what began as a cultural war of independence from Britain devolved into a battle among lexicographers, authors, scholars, and publishers, all vying for dictionary supremacy and shattering forever the dream of a unified American language.

From the best-selling author of The Professor and the Madman, The Map That Changed the World, and Krakatoa comes a truly wonderful celebration of the English language and of its unrivaled treasure house, the Oxford English Dictionary.

Writing with marvelous brio, Winchester first serves up a lightning history of the English language—"so vast, so sprawling, so wonderfully unwieldy"—and pays homage to the great dictionary

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Problems in Lexicography is an essential, classic work of practical lexicography (the practice of writing dictionaries) and meta-lexicography. Originally published over sixty years ago, it was based on the proceedings of the Indiana University Conference on Lexicography, held November 11–12, 1960. It set a standard that still holds today, three generations later. This critical and historical edition, brilliantly researched and presented by Michael...

Whether you are traveling to Great Britain or just want to understand British popular culture, this unique dictionary will answer your questions. British English from A to Zed contains more than 5,500 British terms and their American equivalents, each with a short explanation of the term's history and an example of its use. The appendixes provide valuable supplemental material with differences between British and American pronunciation,

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Le parler kinois, pratiqué à Kinshasa et dans les communautés kinoises, constitue un mélange de lingala, de kikongo, de français et d'argot. Il ne respecte pas les règles de grammaire, mêlant le singulier et le pluriel, sans que cela ne vexe personne. Ce lexique, loin d'être exhaustif - on s'en doute -, reprend cependant bon nombre de termes, d'expressions à la mode d'hier ou d'autres en vogue aujourd'hui et constitue en quelque sorte une...

"Skimming through the short passages, the floating dust shimmered like raining glitter as it caught the light . . . An overwhelming wave of curiosity washed over. Plenty of books have caught Etta's eye before, but none created such an urgency to belong to her." Etta is relatively new to Northampton, but has already established what she believes is a good routine - especially after getting a slow start. She has a steady job, she procrastinates...

First published (1939), as Leçons grammaticales théoriques et pratiques de la langue micmaque of Rev. Father Pacifique Buisson, The Mi'kmaw Grammar of Father Pacifique is a vast and important collection of information on the Mi'kmaw language. It represents a tradition of Mi'kmaw grammatical studies by missionary priests that spans more than 200 years, from the days of abbé Pierre Maillard (ca. 1710-1762), to Father Pacifique, who, although he intended...

The new ways of writing pioneered by the literary avant-garde invite new ways of reading commensurate with their modes of composition. Dictionary Poetics examines one of those modes: book-length poems, from Louis Zukofsky to Harryette Mullen, all structured by particular editions of specific dictionaries. By reading these poems in tandem with their source texts, Dworkin puts paid to the notion that even the most abstract and fragmentary avant-garde...