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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.
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English
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Words are essential to our everyday lives. An average person spends his or her day enveloped in conversations, e-mails, phone calls, text messages, directions, headlines, and more. But how often do we stop to think about the origins of the words we use? Have you ever thought about which words in English have been borrowed from Arabic, Dutch, or Portuguese? Try admiral, landscape, and marmalade, just for starters.
The Secret Life of Words is a wide-ranging...
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The creation of the Oxford English Dictionary began in 1857, took seventy years to complete, drew from tens of thousands of brilliant minds, and organized the sprawling language into 414,825 precise definitions. But hidden within the rituals of its creation is a fascinating and mysterious story - a story of two remarkable men whose strange twenty-year relationship lies at the core of this historic undertaking. Professor James Murray, an astonishingly...
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"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...
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For the first time ever, this thrilling literary detective story, doubling as a celebration of words, language, people and one of mankind's greatest achievements, unravels the mystery of the contributors from around the world who, for over seventy years, helped to codify the way we read, write and speak.
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"In 1746, Samuel Johnson undertook the Herculean task of writing the first comprehensive English dictionary. Imagining he could complete the job in three years, Johnson in fact took more than eight, and the dictionary itself turned out to be as much a work of literature as it was an invaluable reference. In alphabetized chapters, from 'Adventurous' to 'Zootomy,' Henry Hitchings tells of Johnson's toil and triumph and offers a closer look at the definitions...
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"In 1934, Webster's Second was the great gray eminence of American dictionaries, with 600,000 entries and numerous competitors but no rivals. It served as the all-knowing guide to the world of grammar and information, a kind of one-stop reference work. In 1961, Webster's Third came along and ignited an unprecedented controversy in America's newspapers, universities, and living rooms. The new dictionary's editor, Philip Gove, had overhauled Merriam's...
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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, grammar,...
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What do "the whole kit and caboodle," "the whole shebang," "the whole megillah," "the whole enchilada," "the whole nine yards," "the whole box and dice," and "the full Monty" have in common? They're all expressions that mean "the entire quantity," and they're all examples of the breadth and depth of the English-speaking world's vocabulary.
From the multitude of words and phrases in daily use, the author of this delightful exploration into what we...
14) Vox Libri
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English
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"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...
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Français
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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...
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"The encyclopedia once shaped our understanding of the world. Created by thousands of scholars and the most obsessive of editors, a good set conveyed a sense of absolute wisdom on its reader. Contributions from Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Orville Wright, Alfred Hitchcock, Marie Curie and Indira Gandhi helped millions of children with their homework. Adults cleared their shelves in the belief that everything that was explainable was now effortlessly...
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Français
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Cet abécédaire reprend des mots du langage courant souvent employés à mauvais escient...
C'est un support pédagogique listant de A à Z les éléments d'une science, d'un art, d'un parti pris.
L'Abécédaire que vous tenez en main en ce moment liste des mots qui font partie du langage courant et que nous employons souvent de manière empirique, sans vraiment en connaître le ou les différents sens.
500 millions, vous aviez bien lu, nous sommes...
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English
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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...
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This beautifully illustrated guide delves deep into the meaning and significance of different tattoo symbols, exploring the rich cultural history around the world of this widespread form of body art.⍾⍾Tattoos are everywhere: one in three of us has at least one. Body art is one of the most popular ways of expressing our identity and beliefs.⍾⍾But whether we're aware of it or not when we choose a design to be permanently inked on our skin, a...
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