Back in 2013, as part of a quarterly online update, the Oxford Dictionary added the word "twerk" to its collection. The addition came after Miley Cyrus' widely discussed performance at the MTV Video ...

From dropped words to fake definitions, learn fun facts, hearsay, and scandal about our most useful language resource, and the words that make it up. You might be surprised to learn what the most ...

Just to work from "A" to "ant" took the original Oxford English Dictionary team around 10 years. They thought they'd reach "Z" in that time — but gathering definitions for hundreds of thousands of ...

Black Americans have long contributed to the ways in which the English language is used, and now a new research project aims to compile the first Oxford Dictionary of African American English.

World Dictionary Day takes place on October 16, the birthday of the American lexicographer Noah Webster, whose enormous, two-volume An American Dictionary of the English Language—published in 1828, ...

"Just how far removed we had already become from Britain even in the nineteenth century was not well understood in the mother country," begins an essay in the first pages of the Canadian Oxford ...

In my teenage years, I believed my father knew every word in the English language. Whenever I stumbled upon an unfamiliar ...

Noah Webster portrait, circa 1891. This post is in partnership with the History News Network, the website that puts the news into historical perspective. A version of the article below was originally ...