You Down With OED?

Mangroves are incredible survivors and adapters. They're also amazing at lessening the impact of tropical storms and climate change. And heck, they're cool looking. So jump into the brackish waters and have a listen to this classic episode all about these beauts.See omnystudio.co ...  عرض المزيد

From the 1970s to the early 1990s a patch of land in Hong Kong the size of just a few football fields was the most densely-populated area in the world – and by a longshot. Even more remarkable, it was an outlaw land that somehow formed a tight community.See omnystudio.com/listene ...  عرض المزيد

Compiling the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary was a seventy-year endeavour that called on thousands of volunteers from all walks of life. The Dictionary People, reviewed by Daisy Hay in the LRB, is a recent attempt to track down the various characters who made the ...  عرض المزيد

In 1844, the Philological Society of London began investigating the creation of a new English dictionary. This initial foray would lead to a dictionary that would be unlike any other dictionary ever created. It would not just give the definition and spelling of a word, but a co ...  عرض المزيد

With 600,000 words and 3 million quotations, the Oxford English Dictionary is a massive tome. Work began on the dictionary in 1857, but the first edition wasn't published until 1884. Compiling the dictionary was a Herculean task, and James Murray, the editor of the dictionary, pu ...  عرض المزيد

In a burst of meta-humor, the Encyclopædia Britannica defines encyclopædia as "reference work that contains information on all branches of knowledge or that treats a particular branch of knowledge in a comprehensive manner." It's high praise -- but if there's any single book that ...  عرض المزيد