The origins and uses of words have been of interest to us since early on, because the terminology around conservation is relatively young; also because words are essential to the cause. Stephanie Hayes, writing this review in the Atlantic, reminds us to keep paying attention to how we know what we know about words:
Who Made the Oxford English Dictionary?
A new book gives life to one of the world’s greatest crowdsourcing efforts.
The Oxford English Dictionary always seemed to me like the Rules from on high—near biblical, laid down long ago by a distant academic elite. But back in 1857, when the idea of the dictionary was born, its three founders proposed something more democratic than authoritative: a reference book that didn’t prescribe but instead described English, tracking the meaning of every word in the language across time and laying out how people were actually using each one. Continue reading

