The New Yorker:

Linguists from Oxford meet to compare notes on words like “bussin” (adj.) and “do-rag” (n.).

By Alex Carp

The Oxford English Dictionary is what’s called a historical dictionary. Along with definitions, it includes evidence of a word’s origins and notes how its usage and meaning have changed over time. James Murray, the Scottish philologist who left school at fourteen and, in 1879, began to assemble what would become the O.E.D., housed some two million quotations and draft entries in a metal shed he called the Scriptorium.

Last summer, a team of linguists and lexicographers from Oxford and researchers from Harvard began a new project, the Oxford Dictionary of African American English. No Scriptorium this time, but they have been using archives, language databases, other dictionaries, slave narratives, novels, the popular press, and social media. (It’s almost certainly the first dictionary whose editors regularly consult Black Twitter.) Oxford provided nearly twelve hundred existing entries for words that may have originated in African American English, such as “cray” (adj., 2006, “crazy. Also reduplicated as ‘cray cray’ ”) and “shade” (n., 1990, “contempt, disapproval, or disrespect, especially when expressed obliquely”). The group would be revising definitions and seeking evidence that words had appeared earlier than the O.E.D. had been able to cite. The project’s three linguists met recently to compare notes.

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