What is Dictionary ?

At any given time, the dictionary's editors are researching the history of certain words and phrases, and The OED Appeals allows the public to submit evidence (via the comments section) of the earliest record of certain words.

Over 80% of the information stored on computers worldwide is in English.

Camouflage and Arnold Palmer are two entries that the OED has recently researched, so if you have old books or magazines that mention some weird word, let the OED know.

“I am” is the shortest complete sentence in the English language.

Words that are used to fill in time when speaking, such as ‘like’ or ‘basically’, are called crutch words (and should best be avoided!)

You might just see your contribution in the dictionary's next edition.

A pangram sentence is one that contains every letter in the language.

English is the official language of 67 countries.

SAMPLE SENTENCES FROM DICTIONARIES CAN MAKE INTERESTING SHORT STORIES.

90% of English text consists of just 1000 words.

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious (*breath*) is NOT the longest word in English.

You might think that all those sample sentences in the dictionary are random, but you'd only be partially right.

The phrases are deliberately chosen to show the word in a clear context with other words that it's often associated with, and are ideally so boring that you don't even think twice about them.

There are 24 different dialects of English in the US.

Illustrator Jez Burrows has connected these random sentences from the New Oxford American Dictionary into short stories.

The word ‘lol’ was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2011.

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious- This extra long word (that approximately means “fantastic”) was popularized by the movie Mary Poppins and was eventually added to the dictionary. What you probably didn’t know is that there is a word that is longer—yes longer—than this one. Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis is a type of lung disease caused by inhaling ash and dust. Go ahead and try pronouncing that!

"Often I’ll find at least one [word] that makes a good jumping-off point and I’ll start to flesh out some sort of vague narrative, then work backwards to imagine what sort of words might give rise to the sentences I'm looking for," Burrows said of his process

What is known as British accent came to use in and around London around the time of the American Revolution.

A LOT OF WEIRD DICTIONARIES EXIST.

There are “ghost words” that mean nothing.

The word ‘Goodbye’ originally comes from an Old English phrase meaning ‘god be with you’.

The shortest, oldest, and most commonly used word is “I.”

Although most people are familiar with Webster, the OED, and Dictionary.com, there are plenty of obscure or downright bizarre dictionaries.

Etymologically, Great Britain means ‘great land of the tattooed’.