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Erin McKean | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | 1971 (age 51–52) |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | University of Chicago (BA, MA) |
| Occupation | Lexicographer |
Erin McKean (born 1971) is an American lexicographer.
| |
Erin McKean | |
|---|---|
| | |
| Born | 1971 (age 51–52) |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | University of Chicago (BA, MA) |
| Occupation | Lexicographer |
Erin McKean (born 1971) is an American lexicographer.
McKean was born in Charlotte, North Carolina. [1] She graduated from the University of Chicago with a BA/MA in Linguistics. As an undergraduate, she worked in a junior capacity on the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary. [2] She has since served on the Visiting Committee to the University of Chicago's Regenstein Library, and she helped organize a dictionary-themed exhibit, The Meaning of Dictionaries, there in 2007. [3] [4]
McKean is a founder of Reverb, which makes the online dictionary Wordnik. [5] She was previously the editor in chief of US Dictionaries for Oxford University Press and Principal Editor of The New Oxford American Dictionary , second edition. [6] [7]
McKean is also the editor of VERBATIM: The Language Quarterly, and edited a collection of work from that publication, Verbatim: From the bawdy to the sublime, the best writing on language for word lovers, grammar mavens, and armchair linguists (Mariner Books, 2001). McKean's novel The Secret Lives of Dresses was a best-seller in Australia, and has been optioned for film. [8] [9] She writes about dresses in her blog, A Dress A Day.
She wrote frequently for "The Word" column in The Boston Globe . [10] from 2008 through 2011 and wrote "The Week in Words" for The Wall Street Journal from 2011 through mid-2013. [11] She has also written for The New York Times On Language column. [12]
She was previously a member of the advisory board of the Wikimedia Foundation [13] and is an advisor to Credo Reference. [14]
McKean's 2007 TED talk, "Redefining the Dictionary", was the genesis for the founding of Wordnik.com. [15] She has also spoken at Pop!Tech, Mark Hurst's third annual Gel conference, and Thinking Digital, and gave a Wordnik demo at the All Things Digital D8 conference in 2010. [16] [17] [18] [19] McKean sews her own clothes and often makes "stunt dresses" for speeches, including the Tetris-themed dress she wore to speak at the Web 2.0 Summit in 2009. [20]
In 2010, McKean was named an honorary fellow of the Society for Technical Communication. [21]
McKean has formulated 'McKean's law', also known as Muphry's law: "Any correction of the speech or writing of others will contain at least one grammatical, spelling or typographical error." [22]
"Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked ‘female'.", a quote from McKean's blog, A Dress A Day, has been widely shared on social media. [23] Since the original post features a large picture of Diana Vreeland, the quote has occasionally been misattributed to her. [24]
A definition is a statement of the meaning of a term. Definitions can be classified into two large categories: intensional definitions, and extensional definitions. Another important category of definitions is the class of ostensive definitions, which convey the meaning of a term by pointing out examples. A term may have many different senses and multiple meanings, and thus require multiple definitions.
Lexicography is the study of lexicons, and is divided into two separate academic disciplines. It is the art of compiling dictionaries.
The New Oxford American Dictionary (NOAD) is a single-volume dictionary of American English compiled by American editors at the Oxford University Press.
Wiktionary is a multilingual, web-based project to create a free content dictionary of terms in all natural languages and in a number of artificial languages. These entries may contain definitions, images for illustration, pronunciations, etymologies, inflections, usage examples, quotations, related terms, and translations of terms into other languages, among other features. It is collaboratively edited via a wiki. Its name is a portmanteau of the words wiki and dictionary. It is available in 192 languages and in Simple English. Like its sister project Wikipedia, Wiktionary is run by the Wikimedia Foundation, and is written collaboratively by volunteers, dubbed "Wiktionarians". Its wiki software, MediaWiki, allows almost anyone with access to the website to create and edit entries.
A defining vocabulary is a list of words used by lexicographers to write dictionary definitions. The underlying principle goes back to Samuel Johnson's notion that words should be defined using 'terms less abstruse than that which is to be explained', and a defining vocabulary provides the lexicographer with a restricted list of high-frequency words which can be used for producing simple definitions of any word in the dictionary.
Erin is a personal name taken from the Hiberno-English word for Ireland, originating from the Irish word "Éirinn". "Éirinn" is the dative case of the Irish word for Ireland, "Éire", genitive "Éireann", the dative being used in prepositional phrases such as "go hÉirinn" "to Ireland", "in Éirinn" "in Ireland", "ó Éirinn" "from Ireland".
Owing to the dominance of the Google search engine, to google has become a transitive verb. The neologism commonly refers to searching for information on the World Wide Web, typically using the Google search engine. The American Dialect Society chose it as the "most useful word of 2002". It was added to the Oxford English Dictionary on June 15, 2006, and to the eleventh edition of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary in July 2006.
The word orange is a noun and an adjective in the English language. In both cases, it refers primarily to the orange fruit and the color orange, but has many other derivative meanings.
Susie Dent is an English lexicographer, etymologist, and media personality. She has appeared in "Dictionary Corner" on the Channel 4 game show Countdown since 1992. She also appears on 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown, a post-watershed comedy version of the show.
The word(s) of the year, sometimes capitalized as "Word(s) of the Year" and abbreviated "WOTY", refers to any of various assessments as to the most important word(s) or expression(s) in the public sphere during a specific year.
Beryl T. "Sue" Atkins was a British lexicographer, specialising in computational lexicography, who pioneered the creation of bilingual dictionaries from corpus data.
Grant Barrett is an American lexicographer, specializing in slang, jargon and new usage, and the author and compiler of language-related books and dictionaries. He is a co-host and co-producer of the American weekly, hour-long public radio show and podcast A Way with Words. He has made regular appearances on Christopher Kimball's Milk Street Radio, is often consulted as a language commentator, and has written for The New York Times and The Washington Post, and served as a lexicographer for Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press.
Paul Dickson is a freelance writer of more than 65 non-fiction books, mostly on American English language, history, and popular culture.
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.
In lexicography, antedating is finding earlier citations of a particular term than those already known.
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".
Wordnik, a nonprofit organization, is an online English dictionary and language resource that provides dictionary and thesaurus content. Some of the content is based on print dictionaries such as the Century Dictionary, the American Heritage Dictionary, WordNet, and GCIDE. Wordnik has collected a corpus of billions of words which it uses to display example sentences, allowing it to provide information on a much larger set of words than a typical dictionary. Wordnik uses as many real examples as possible when defining a word.
The Chicago Maroon, the independent student newspaper of the University of Chicago, is a weekly publication founded in 1892. During autumn, winter, and spring quarters of the academic year, The Maroon publishes every Wednesday. The paper consists of seven sections: news, opinion ("Viewpoints"), arts, sports, Grey City, podcasts, and games. In the late summer, it publishes its annual orientation Issue (O-Issue) for entering first-year students, including sections on the University and the city of Chicago.
The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary is a 2006 book by three editors of the Oxford English Dictionary, Peter Gilliver, Jeremy Marshall and Edmund Weiner. It examines J. R. R. Tolkien's brief period working as a lexicographer with the OED after World War I, traces his use of philology as it is apparent in his writings, and in particular in his legendarium, and finally examines in detail over 100 words that he used, developed or invented.
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