Ammon Shea is an American writer, known for his nonfiction books about the English language. With Peter Novobatzky, he wrote Depraved English (1999) and Insulting English (2001), which highlight obscure and unusual English words. Shea later read the entire Oxford English Dictionary , and documented his observations in Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages (2008). [1] [2] He was subsequently hired to work at Oxford University Press as a consulting editor of American dictionaries. Shea has also contributed to the "On Language" column in Sunday's New York Times. [3] Shea is also the author of The Phone Book: The Curious History of the Book That Everyone Uses But No One Reads (2010) [4] and Bad English: A History of Linguistic Aggravation (2014) [5]
A dictionary collector, Shea had already read Webster's Second International Dictionary in the 1990s. [6] During his life, he has worked as a gondolier, a mover, and a busker. [7]
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is the principal historical dictionary of the English language, published by Oxford University Press (OUP). It traces the historical development of the English language, providing a comprehensive resource to scholars and academic researchers, as well as describing usage in its many variations throughout the world.
The Elements of Style is an American English writing style guide in numerous editions. The original was written by William Strunk Jr. in 1918, and published by Harcourt in 1920, comprising eight "elementary rules of usage", ten "elementary principles of composition", "a few matters of form", a list of 49 "words and expressions commonly misused", and a list of 57 "words often misspelled". E. B. White greatly enlarged and revised the book for publication by Macmillan in 1959. That was the first edition of the so-called Strunk & White, which Time named in 2011 as one of the 100 best and most influential books written in English since 1923.
Azar Nafisi is an Iranian-American writer and professor of English literature. Born in Tehran, Iran, she has resided in the United States since 1997 and became a U.S. citizen in 2008.
Ivor Armstrong Richards CH, known as I. A. Richards, was an English educator, literary critic, poet, and rhetorician. His work contributed to the foundations of the New Criticism, a formalist movement in literary theory which emphasized the close reading of a literary text, especially poetry, in an effort to discover how a work of literature functions as a self-contained and self-referential æsthetic object.
In English-language punctuation, a serial comma is a comma placed immediately after the penultimate term in a series of three or more terms. For example, a list of three countries might be punctuated either as "France, Italy and Spain" or "France, Italy, and Spain".
David Crystal, is a British linguist, academic, and author.
Alberto Manguel is an Argentine-Canadian anthologist, translator, essayist, novelist, editor, and a former Director of the National Library of Argentina. He is the author of numerous non-fiction books such as The Dictionary of Imaginary Places, A History of Reading (1996), The Library at Night (2007) and Homer's Iliad and Odyssey: A Biography (2008); and novels such as News From a Foreign Country Came (1991). Though almost all of Manguel's books were written in English, two of his novels were written in Spanish, and El regreso has not yet been published in English. Manguel has also written film criticism such as Bride of Frankenstein (1997) and collections of essays such as Into the Looking Glass Wood (1998). In 2007, Manguel was selected to be that year's annual lecturer for the prestigious Massey Lectures. in 2021, he gave the Roger Lancelyn Green lecture to the Lewis Carroll Society on his love of the 'Alice' stories from Lewis Carroll.
David Lehman is an American poet, non-fiction writer, and literary critic, and the founder and series editor for The Best American Poetry. He was a writer and freelance journalist for fifteen years, writing for such publications as Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. In 2006, Lehman served as Editor for the new Oxford Book of American Poetry. He taught and was the Poetry Coordinator at The New School in New York City until May 2018.
For centuries, there have been movements to reform the spelling of the English language. It seeks to change English orthography so that it is more consistent, matches pronunciation better, and follows the alphabetic principle. Common motives for spelling reform include quicker learning, cheaper learning, and making English more useful as an international auxiliary language.
Archibald Randolph Ammons was an American poet who won the annual National Book Award for Poetry in 1973 and 1993.
Henry Hitchings is an author, reviewer and critic, specializing in narrative non-fiction, with a particular emphasis on language and cultural history. The second of his books, The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English, won the 2008 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and a Somerset Maugham Award. He has written two books about Samuel Johnson and has served as the president of the Johnson Society of Lichfield. As a critic, he has mainly written about books and theatre. As of 2018, he is chair of the drama section of the UK's Critics' Circle.
A cell phone novel, or mobile phone novel, were literary works originally written on a cellular phone via text messaging. This type of literature originated in Japan, where it became a popular literary genre. However, its popularity also spread to other countries internationally, especially to China, United States, Germany, Italy and South Africa. Chapters usually consist of about 70–100 words each due to character limitations on cell phones.
Benjamin Zimmer is an American linguist, lexicographer, and language commentator. He is a language columnist for The Wall Street Journal and contributing editor for The Atlantic. He was formerly a language columnist for The Boston Globe and The New York Times Magazine, and editor of American dictionaries at Oxford University Press. Zimmer was also an executive editor of Vocabulary.com and VisualThesaurus.com.
A portmanteau or portmanteau word is a blend of words in which parts of multiple words are combined into a new word, as in smog, coined by blending smoke and fog, or motel, from motor and hotel. In linguistics, a portmanteau is a single morph that is analyzed as representing two underlying morphemes. When portmanteaus shorten established compounds, they can be considered clipped compounds.
Reading is the process of taking in the sense or meaning of letters, symbols, etc., especially by sight or touch.
Short Message Service (SMS) language, textspeak, or texting language is the abbreviated language and slang commonly used in the late 1990s and early 2000s with mobile phone text messaging, and occasionally through Internet-based communication such as email and instant messaging.
Jonathon Green is an English lexicographer of slang and writer on the history of alternative cultures. Jonathon Green is often referred to as the English-speaking world's leading lexicographer of slang, and has even been described as "the most acclaimed British lexicographer since Johnson".
Sol Steinmetz was a Hungarian American linguistics and lexicography expert who wrote extensively about etymologies, definitions and uncovered earliest recorded usages of words in English and Yiddish. A widely sought source on all things lexical, he earned recognition from William Safire in his On Language column in The New York Times Magazine in 2006 as a "lexical supermaven".
Mark Forsyth is a British writer of non-fiction who came to prominence with a series of books concerning the meaning and etymology of English words.
Pleco Software provides an English and Chinese Dictionary application for iOS and Android devices. The Pleco Software company was founded in May 2000 by Michael Love when he was studying abroad in China. Having difficulty remembering characters, Love developed a very rudimentary handwriting based dictionary for personal use on a Palm IIIx, and then realized it could be a good business opportunity, pursuing further development of the application we see today.