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Book Review: The Word Detective by John Simpson

Posted on February 25, 2020April 10, 2022
Topics: History, Nonfiction

Rating: 6.5/10.

Memoir about how the Oxford English Dictionary is created. Author joins the team in the 1970s, after being a grad student in medieval literature. He reads obscure books from all sorts of genres to find new words to add, and often a lot of scholarly research and debate goes into settling a word’s etymology. The OED is a century-old project that has trouble keeping up, since it takes decades to complete a “supplement”, and by then, the language has already changed. Stopped reading after 100 or so pages because the writing got too tedious.

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