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It is found in English-language sources written before Mary was even born. [70] Nasty: The term nasty was not derived from the surname of Thomas Nast as a reference to his biting, vitriolic cartoons. The word may be related to the Dutch word nestig, or "dirty". [71]
Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition Oxford Dictionary has 273,000 headwords; 171,476 of them being in current use, 47,156 being obsolete words and around 9,500 derivative words included as subentries. The dictionary contains 157,000 combinations and derivatives, and 169,000 phrases and combinations, making a total of over 600,000 word-forms.
The English word orthography is first attested in the 15th century, ultimately from Ancient Greek: ὀρθός (orthós 'correct') and γράφειν (gráphein 'to write'). [3] Orthography in phonetic writing systems is often concerned with matters of spelling, i.e. the correspondence between written graphemes and the phonemes found in speech.
About 10,000 French and Norman loan words entered Middle English, particularly terms associated with government, church, law, the military, fashion, and food. [20] See English language word origins and List of English words of French origin. Although English is a Germanic language, it has a deep connection to Romance languages. The roots of ...
In English (among others), John Cowell's Interpreter, a law dictionary, was published in 1607, Edward Phillips' The new world of English words came out in 1658 and a dictionary of 40,000 words had been prepared in 1721 by Nathan Bailey, though none was as comprehensive in breadth or style as Johnson's.
Some words contain silent letters, which do not represent any sound in modern English pronunciation. Examples include the l in talk, half, calf, etc., the w in two and sword, gh as mentioned above in numerous words such as though, daughter, night, brought, and the commonly encountered silent e (discussed further below).
An early non-alphabetical list of 8000 English words was the Elementarie, created by Richard Mulcaster in 1582. [23] [24] The first purely English alphabetical dictionary was A Table Alphabeticall, written by English schoolteacher Robert Cawdrey in 1604. [2] [3] The only surviving copy is found at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. This dictionary ...
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is the principal historical dictionary of the English language, published by Oxford University Press (OUP), a University of Oxford publishing house. The dictionary, which published its first edition in 1884, traces the historical development of the English language, providing a comprehensive resource to ...