For how long have we doomscrolled, and what’s the cure? Who popularized the glitch? Why is snobbery just a load of old cobblers? Join lexicographers Fiona McPherson and Craig Leyland to find out how the Oxford English Dictionary answers these questions and more in its March 2026 update.
Come back for another episode on April 15th, when we’ll be talking about the history of the word digital; the impact Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, had on the English language; and the longest word in the OED.
https://www.oed.com
https://www.oed.com/information/updates/march-2026/
[email protected]
Music by Matt Cutmore
Glossary
Antedating: an occurrence of a word, phrase, or sense, which predates the earliest use previously known or recorded.
Collocation: the habitual juxtaposition or association of a particular word with other particular words; a group of words so associated.
Compound: two or more words put together to make a new word or phrase (like hot sauce, nutcracker, or Greenwich Mean Time).
Entry: a section of a dictionary devoted to a particular word, starting with the headword and including the etymology, pronunciation, senses, compounds, etc.
Etymology: the origin and historical development of a word; the process of investigating this.
Headword: the word you look up, at the start of the entry; the word that is being defined.
Lexicography: the art/science/craft of writing dictionaries. A lexicographer is a writer of dictionaries. (“A harmless drudge that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words,” according to Samuel Johnson. Fair enough, he should know.)
Obsolete: describing a word as no longer in use. (For OED’s purposes, that means we haven’t found any evidence of it after 1930.)
Poddery: podcasting? We thought it sounded fun. It's not in OED...yet.
Sense: any of the various distinct meanings of a particular word.
Small-type note: text (in small type!) that sits under the main definition, where we can add extra, useful information that doesn’t fit in the main definition itself.
Update: a new version of OED, including new and revised entries, as published four times a year on oed.com. Also called a release.
