New Zealand English (NZE) is the variant of the English language spoken and written by most English-speaking New Zealanders. Its language code in ISO and Internet standards is en-NZ. English is the first language of the majority of the population.
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.
Singular they, along with its inflected or derivative forms, them, their, theirs, and themselves, is a gender-neutral third-person pronoun. It typically occurs with an indeterminate antecedent, in sentences such as:
A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926), by Henry Watson Fowler (1858–1933), is a style guide to British English usage, pronunciation, and writing. Covering topics such as plurals and literary technique, distinctions among like words, and the use of foreign terms, the dictionary became the standard for other style guides to writing in English. Hence, the 1926 first edition remains in print, along with the 1965 second edition, edited by Ernest Gowers, which was reprinted in 1983 and 1987. The 1996 third edition was re-titled as The New Fowler's Modern English Usage, and revised in 2004, was mostly rewritten by Robert W. Burchfield, as a usage dictionary that incorporated corpus linguistics data; and the 2015 fourth edition, revised and re-titled Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage, was edited by Jeremy Butterfield, as a usage dictionary. Informally, readers refer to the style guide and dictionary as Fowler's Modern English Usage, Fowler, and Fowler's.
Webster's Dictionary is any of the English language dictionaries edited in the early 19th century by Noah Webster (1758–1843), an American lexicographer, as well as numerous related or unrelated dictionaries that have adopted the Webster's name in his honor. "Webster's" has since become a genericized trademark in the United States for English dictionaries, and is widely used in dictionary titles.
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (AHD) is a dictionary of American English published by Boston publisher Houghton Mifflin, the first edition of which appeared in 1969. Its creation was spurred by the controversy over the perceived permissiveness of the Webster's Third New International Dictionary. The third edition included over 350,000 entries and meanings.
The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia is one of the largest encyclopedic dictionaries of the English language. In its day it was compared favorably with the Oxford English Dictionary, and frequently consulted for more factual information than would normally be the case for a dictionary.
Henry Watson Fowler was an English schoolmaster, lexicographer and commentator on the usage of the English language. He is notable for both A Dictionary of Modern English Usage and his work on the Concise Oxford Dictionary, and was described by The Times as "a lexicographical genius".
Scare quotes are quotation marks that writers place around a word or phrase to signal that they are using it in an ironic, referential, or otherwise non-standard sense. Scare quotes may indicate that the author is using someone else's term, similar to preceding a phrase with the expression "so-called"; they may imply skepticism or disagreement, belief that the words are misused, or that the writer intends a meaning opposite to the words enclosed in quotes. Whether quotation marks are considered scare quotes depends on context because scare quotes are not visually different from actual quotations. The use of scare quotes is sometimes discouraged in formal or academic writing.
Webster's New World Dictionary of the American Language is an American dictionary published first in 1951 and since 2022 by HarperCollins Publishers.
Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary is a large American dictionary, first published in 1966 as The Random House Dictionary of the English Language: The Unabridged Edition. Edited by Editor-in-chief Jess Stein, it contained 315,000 entries in 2256 pages, as well as 2400 illustrations. The CD-ROM version in 1994 also included 120,000 spoken pronunciations.
The American Dialect Society (ADS), founded in 1889, is a learned society "dedicated to the study of the English language in North America, and of other languages, or dialects of other languages, influencing it or influenced by it." The Society publishes the academic journal American Speech.
The Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) is a record of American English as spoken in the United States, from its beginnings to the present. It differs from other dictionaries in that it does not document the standard language used throughout the country. Instead, it contains regional and folk speech, those words, phrases, and pronunciations that vary from one part of the country to another, or that are learned from family and friends rather than from teachers and books. For DARE, a "region" may be as small as a city or part of a city, or as large as most of the country. Humanities magazine has described it as "a bold synthesis of linguistic atlas and historical dictionary", and William Safire called it "the most exciting new linguistic project in the twentieth century".
Clarence Lewis Barnhart (1900–1993) was an American lexicographer best known for editing the Thorndike-Barnhart series of graded dictionaries, published by Scott Foresman & Co. which were based on word lists and concepts of definition developed by psychological theorist Edward Thorndike. Barnhart subsequently revised and expanded the series and with the assistance of his sons, maintaining them through the 1980s.
Robert K. Barnhart was an American lexicographer and editor of various specialized dictionaries. He was co-editor, with his father Clarence Barnhart, on some editions of the Thorndike-Barnhart dictionaries and The World Book Dictionary. With his father and Sol Steinmetz, he edited the three volumes of The Barnhart Dictionary of New English.
The World Book Dictionary is a two-volume English dictionary published as a supplement to the World Book Encyclopedia. It was originally published in 1963 under the editorship of Clarence Barnhart, who wrote definitions for the Thorndike-Barnhart graded dictionary series for children, based on the educational works of Edward Thorndike whom Clarence Barnhart had known and worked with decades before. In some editions it was called the World Book Encyclopedia Dictionary. The writing and editing of special articles was carried out by the staff of the World Book Encyclopedia. Encyclopedia staff also reviewed the work for consistency with the encyclopedia and appropriateness of its users.
Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged is an American English-language dictionary published in September 1961. It was edited by Philip Babcock Gove and a team of lexicographers who spent 757 editor-years and $3.5 million. The most recent printing has 2,816 pages, and as of 2005, it contained more than 476,000 vocabulary entries, 500,000 definitions, 140,000 etymologies, 200,000 verbal illustrations, 350,000 example sentences, 3,000 pictorial illustrations and an 18,000-word Addenda section.
Truthiness is the belief or assertion that a particular statement is true based on the intuition or perceptions of some individual or individuals, without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts. Truthiness can range from ignorant assertions of falsehoods to deliberate duplicity or propaganda intended to sway opinions.
Fuck is an English-language profanity which often refers to the act of sexual intercourse, but is also commonly used as an intensifier or to convey disdain. While its origin is obscure, it is usually considered to be first attested to around 1475. In modern usage, the term fuck and its derivatives are used as a noun, a verb, an adjective, an interjection or an adverb. There are many common phrases that employ the word as well as compounds that incorporate it, such as motherfucker, fuckwit, fuckwad, fuckup, fucknut, fuckhead, fuckface, fucktard, and fuck off.
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".
