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As a historical dictionary, the Oxford English Dictionary features entries in which the earliest ascertainable recorded sense of a word, whether current or obsolete, is presented first, and each additional sense is presented in historical order according to the date of its earliest ascertainable recorded use. [5]
This is a list of English words inherited and derived directly from the Old English stage of the language. This list also includes neologisms formed from Old English roots and/or particles in later forms of English, and words borrowed into other languages (e.g. French, Anglo-French, etc.) then borrowed back into English (e.g. bateau, chiffon, gourmet, nordic, etc.).
There are also many words in Modern English that bear little or no resemblance in meaning to their Old English etymons. Some linguists estimate that as much as 80 percent of the lexicon of Old English was lost by the end of the Middle English period, including many compound words, e.g. bōchūs ('bookhouse', 'library'), yet the components 'book ...
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.
A fossil word is a word that is broadly obsolete but remains in current use due to its presence within an idiom or phrase. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] An example for a word sense is 'ado' in 'much ado'. An example for a phrase is ' in point ' (relevant), which is retained in the larger phrases ' case in point ' (also 'case on point' in the legal context) and ...
For some languages, like Sanskrit and Greek, the historical dictionary (in the sense of a word-list explaining the meanings of words that were obsolete at the time of their compilation) was the first form of dictionary developed; though not being scholarly historical dictionaries in the modern sense, they did give a sense of semantic change over time.
Here's how the process of deleting a word from the dictionary works and why it happens in the first place. Ever tried reading the whole dictionary? Here's how long it would take you.
The dictionary is not based on the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) – it is a separate dictionary which strives to represent faithfully the current usage of English words. The Revised Second Edition contains 355,000 words, phrases, and definitions, including biographical references and thousands of encyclopaedic entries.