The Oxford Dictionary of New Words:
A popular guide to words in the news
PREFACE Preface
This is the first dictionary entirely
devoted to new words and meanings to have been published by the Oxford
University Press. It follows in the tradition of the Supplement to the Oxford
English Dictionary in attempting to record the history of some recent additions
to the language, but,unlike the Supplement, it is necessarily very selective in
the words,phrases, and meanings whose stories it sets out to tell and it stands
as an independent work, unrelated (except in the resources it draws upon) to the
Oxford English Dictionary.
The aim of the Oxford Dictionary of New
Words is to provide an informative and readable guide to about two thousand
high-profile words and phrases which have been in the news during the past
decade; rather than simply defining these words (as dictionaries of new words have tended to
do in
the past), it also explains
their derivation and the events which brought them to prominence, illustrated by examples of their
use in journalism and fiction. In order to do this, it draws on the published and
unpublished resources
of the Oxford English Dictionary, the research that is routinely
carried out in preparing new
entries for that work, and the word-files an databases of the Oxford Dictionary
Department.
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