You know that thing with the name? the whatsamajig? the whozeewhatzit?
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Articles on Dictionary
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Pleasant-sounding words might have a leg up.
2023 will be remembered for more than quirky new phrases.
The road to becoming a champion speller is made easier with support from family and friends, but ultimately it depends on an individual student’s commitment to learning, a scholar writes.
The Warlpiri Dictionary has been 60 years in the making – and it’s shortlisted for the 2023 Australian Book Industry Awards, a rarity for a dictionary.
Updates to the Oxford English Dictionary provide a fascinating glimpse into how language changes in the face of rapid and unprecedented social and economic disruption.
The word ‘OK’ has only been around for 180 years, but it’s become the most spoken word on the planet.
A dictionary of African politics reveals the witty and insightful political terminology that people in different African countries use.
‘Milkshake duck’, a word created in 2016 on Twitter, is the Macquarie Dictionary Word of the Year. Efforts to coin new words have a long history and were particularly in vogue in the 1980s.
Here is a handful of extremely useful expressions with political application which have fallen by the wayside, but remain apt and adept today.
Our communications revolution is changing the way we write and speak, and ‘Slanglish’ has never had it so good.
Top contributors
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Associate Dean and Professor of Psychology, University of Memphis
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Kate Burridge is a Friend of The Conversation.
Professor of Linguistics, Monash University
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PhD Student in Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick
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Associate Provost and Professor of American Studies, Amherst College
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Professor emerita, Australian National University
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Director of Slang and New Language Archive, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, King's College London
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Senior Lecturer in English Language/Linguistics, University of Liverpool
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Warlpiri Indigenous Knowledge Holder, Indigenous Knowledge
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Professor of Democracy, University of Birmingham
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Professor of English, Arizona State University
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DPhil Candidate, University of Oxford
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Associate Professor of linguistics, Australian National University
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Course coordinator, The University of Queensland
