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Welcome to four letter word season!
We're kicking off with one of the most versatile words: it can be a noun, verb, punctuation, expostulation, full sentence on its own; it can be an intensifier, an insult and a compliment... and a Category A swear. Thus, of course, content note: this episode contains many category A swears, plus some sexual references.
Read moreHappy tenth birthday to this show! To celebrate, here's every randomly selected word from the dictionary from the first decade of the show.
Read moreSince 2019, Marwan Kaabour has been collecting Arabic slang words used by and about queer people, first for the online community Takweer, and now the newly published Queer Arab Glossary. "When researching for this book, I discovered so much of the sociopolitical, cultural, linguistic, and historical layers that make up the words," he says. He also discovered quite a lot about frying, white beans and worms (metaphorical ones).
Read moreAt the Scripps National Spelling Bee, behind the spectacle of kids vying to be champion spellers, a whole lot of work goes on to make words into this word sport.
Read moreI went to the 2024 Scripps National Spelling Bee, to marvel at kids spelling words I had mostly never even heard of. But when you’re at Bee Week, the competitive spelling is merely the tip of the icebee.
Read moreIt's our annual end of year parade of all the extra good stuff this year's podguests talked about, including a mythical disappearing island, geese, human dictionaries, the dubious history of the Body Mass Index, Victorian death department stores, and much more.
Read moreWhen Spanish missionaries arrived in what is now called Florida, there were 100,000-200,000 Timucua people in the region. Just two centuries later, there were fewer than 100. Soon, with all the people who spoke it dead, the Timucua language died out, too, preserved only in a few Spanish-Timucua religious texts.
In the 21st century, linguistic anthropologist Aaron Broadwell and historian Alejandra Dubcovsky have been decoding and translating these texts to understand the Timucua language and the people who were writing it down.
Read moreLexicographer, author and Dictionary Corner resident Susie Dent has been studying words to make us feel happy. She brings etymologies concerning cows, gas, guts and fat, of bellies and breathing and bonanzas. And some that came from the high seas and aren't made up!
Read moreThere's an abiding myth that the landmark dictionaries are the work of one man, in a dusty paper-filled garrett tirelessly working away singlehandedly. But really it took a village: behind every Big Daddy of Lexicography was usually a team of women, keeping the garrett clean, organising the piles of papers, reading through all the citations, doing research, writing definitions, editing, subediting...essentially being lexicographers, without the credit or the pay.
Academic Lindsay Rose Russell, author of Women and Dictionary-Making, talks about the roles of women in lexicography: enabling male lexicographers to get the job done, but also making their own dictionaries, and challenging the very paradigms of dictionaries.
Sterling Martin was in grad school, studying C. elegans worms, when COVID19 hit and suddenly he found himself in lexicography, as part of a team creating a Navajo-English dictionary of science terms.
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