But it doesn’t have a definition of its own, because we are directed to ‘another name for cirque’. Corrie (I got stuck in the Cs), that evocative, chilly word derived from Gaelic meaning a scooped-out valley-like space underneath a mountain peak, is in! Triumph. Cross, as in cutting on the cross in dressmaking, wasn’t listed in the 20 or more entries for that very useful word, though the sense of a diagonal was. ![]() Do we expect political neutrality from a dictionary? It’s certainly a vivid image. Churn, from statistics, meaning the movement over time of demographic characteristics within population samples, was not listed, though ten other definitions for churn were, including this unexpected metaphor: ‘(of a government) to pay benefits to a wide category of people and claw it back by taxation of the well-off’. I looked for some words from technical vocabularies. ![]() So are the bookish and the musically highbrow in charge of deciding which words go in? They have a taste for scatology and words to make the back row of the classroom giggle, so there is a definite nod towards the popular or casual user. This seems odd, given that very few people apart from the bookish have heard of H, Sir A, though many more will have heard of The Prisoner of Zenda. Hope, Sir Antony, is favoured with a 7-line biography, which is more than Ray Charles or any of the other Charleses were given. Another mixture of the known, the vaguely familiar and the new to me, which is what I’d expect. Leaping forward to H, I randomly alight at: Hope, Sir Antony, Hopeh or Hopei, hophead, Hopi, Hopkins (Sir Anthony, Sir Frederick Gowland, Gerard Manley, Harry Lloyd), hoplite, hoplology, hopper, Hopper, hopple and Hoppus Foot. I also only knew charnel, Charolais and the Charons: the rest of that list was new to me. Neither of the two Charpentiers listed are the only one I know: the 1920s French boxer. Over on the other page, we have a sample sequence: Charminar, charmonium, charneco, charnel, Charnley, Charolais, Charon (ferryman), Charon (Plutonian satellite, or can we say ‘moon now?), charoset, Charpentier. The last Charles, even after Charles XIV of Sweden and Norway, is Charles the Great, ‘another name for Charlemagne’, which gets us back where started: Charlemagne is the Alpha and Omega of Charleses Regnant. Does it judge musical taste as well? Is Kylie in? The Nolans? Is Charles Aznavour in ‘A’? (No, no, and no.) Continuing with Charles, we get Charles I, the first three of whom are three of the Holy Roman Emperors, and then the King of England, Scotland and Wales who was beheaded. I didn’t much like Tina Charles the 1970s pop star, but her absence shows that the dictionary has made judgements about musical longevity. ‘ Charles’ is (1) Prince Charles, and then (2) Charles, Ray. Of course, that then begs the question, who is in and who is out, and how does the dictionary stop itself turning into a Who’s Who? I arrived at C for Charles. It’s a people dictionary too, which would explain its length. It has a surprisingly long section on how to read the entries, which I skipped, because surely everyone knows how to read a dictionary?įlicking through the entries in A, I noted Assange, Julian. It has a jolly introduction by an eminent popular writer about words, Mark Forsyth, in a tone that wobbles between being excessively matey and outbreaks of academickese. ![]() It’s heavy, easily as heavy as a bag of shopping, so it’s a dictionary for the office, or the room where you play Scrabble, not for carrying around. In Hebrew, Noam Dovev wrote a 363-word, 1331-letter palindromic story called, "Do god".The new Collins English Dictionary has a beautiful cover, bound in fabric rather than a slippery tearable paper dustwrapper, so I warm to its tactile friendliness straight away. In French, Oulipo writer George Perec's "Grand Palindrome" (1969) is 5,556 letters in length. In English, two palindromic novels have been published: Satire: Veritas by David Stephens (1980, 58,795 letters), and Dr Awkward & Olson in Oslo by Lawrence Levine (1986, 31,954 words). Malayalam, an Indian language, is of equal length. ![]() The term redivider is used by some writers, but appears to be an invented or derived term-only redivide and redivision appear in the Shorter Oxford Dictionary. Rotavator, a trademarked name for an agricultural machine, is often listed in dictionaries. The Guinness Book of Records gives the title to detartrated, the preterit and past participle of detartrate, a chemical term meaning to remove tartrates. The longest palindromic word in the Oxford English Dictionary is the onomatopoeic tattarrattat, coined by James Joyce in Ulysses (1922) for a knock on the door.
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