The main perk of my job (appart from a rather good pension scheme, obviously) is having the full OED at my fingertips; we have a corporate subscription. The online version is fantastic (if incredibly badly laid out as a website...), and I have to stop myself looking things up, as I loose hours from my working day in a kind of a clicktrance.
I get a 'word of the day' email from them. Today's was 'Stonewall' - interestingly, no mention of its use to refer to the Stonewall riots, but I wonder if this is covered in the usage the dictionary covers... but anyway. They're also involved with a word search - they're looking for very early citations of words like 'cyberspace' - pre-1982, and 'bouncy castle' - pre-1986.
It turns out that they actually have a public lexicography project on the go; the only truly public facing element of it is the Science Fiction Citations word hunt. I thought it was worth pointing to, as I'd never heard it mentioned on the web before, and I know a whole big bunch of people who'd be interested.
Paging Cory, Piers, Ian, Nick and Ann!
Friday, December 02, 2005
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