英语新词词典 Oxford Dictionary of New Words.pdf

The Oxford Dictionary of New Words: A popular guide to words in the news PREFACE Preface This is the first dictionary entirely devoted to new words and meanings to have been published by the Oxford University Press. It follows in the tradition of the Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary in attempting to record the history of some recent additions to the language, but, unlike the Supplement, it is necessarily very selective in the words, phrases, and meanings whose stories it sets out to tell and it stands as an independent work, unrelated (except in the resources it draws upon) to the Oxford English Dictionary. The aim of the Oxford Dictionary of New Words is to provide an informative and readable guide to about two thousand high-profile words and phrases which have been in the news during the past decade; rather than simply defining these words (as dictionaries of new words have tended to do in the past), it also explains their derivation and the events which brought them to prominence, illustrated by examples of their use in journalism and fiction. In order to do this, it draws on the published and unpublished resources of the Oxford English Dictionary, the research that is routinely carried out in preparing new entries for that work, and the word-files and databases of the Oxford Dictionary Department. What is a new word? This, of course, is a question which can never be answered satisfactorily, any more than one can answer the question How long is a piece of string? It is a commonplace to point out that the language is a constantly changing resource, growing in some areas and shrinking in others from day to day. The best one can hope to do in a book of this kind is to take a snapshot of the words and senses which seem to characterize our age and which a reader in fifty or a hundred years time might be unable to understand full