As part of the celebrations of the Oxford English Dictionary’s 90th birthday, we had a live session about how crowdsourcing can be used to build dictionaries.

Dr Sarah Ogilvie, Director of Global Partnerships at Oxford Dictionaries, Oxford University Press, spoke about how you can get involved in collecting words for the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).

David Martin, Principal Editor and Head of the New Words Group, OED, explained how a word gets into the dictionary once it is submitted by a member of the public.

Find out how a dictionary is created: now and in the past, without the help of technology, and follow a word’s journey until it is included in the dictionary, the reasons behind it, and why some words will never make it.

Also, focusing especially on the language of young people today, Dr Ogilvie showed how words are collected for the iGen Language project, a Stanford University research initiative which aims to collect and analyse the language of people who have never known the world without the internet: the iGeneration, Generation Z, or digital natives.