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Nominalisation and zombification
Nominalisation is a bulky term for when a word or phrase – typically a verb or adjective – is converted into a noun. It’s also known by the less formal word nouning. Nominalisation is itself a...
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The word nominalisation is used at least in three different ways. It can mean: 1 a process of word formation in which a noun is formed from another word class by derivation or conversion; 2 a noun...
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“How adjective is that? Very adjective, I’d say”
We welcome back Gill Francis whose insightful blog posts last year attracted lively conversation. Gill will be contributing to the Macmillan Dictionary Blog even more regularly this year: she will...
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Were the Luddites really luddites?
Old-fashioned is a tricky word for lexicographers. It has only one meaning, but several possible interpretations (or ‘readings’, as linguists often call them). This is reflected in the Macmillan...
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Made in America? That’s so not an easy question
Today I’d like to focus on another informal frame, or sequence, which was brought to my attention by a message printed on a brightly-coloured shopping bag in a shop window: “I SO DON’T HAVE ENOUGH...
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Your BuzzWords of 2012
The Macmillan Dictionary BuzzWord feature turns 10 years old later this month! To celebrate this 10th anniversary, we will be posting interesting BuzzWord-related content here on the blog throughout...
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Are adjectives the new nouns?
I’d like first to draw together some threads from recent and not-so-recent posts on the flexibility of word class in English – i.e on verbing, nouning, and the general tendency of words to hop from one...
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Centring around a usage disagreement
Consider this line, which appears in William Gibson’s novel Virtual Light: “One of the Sharman Group’s research initiatives centred around the possibility of isolating mutant strains of HIV.” Gibson is...
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Happy 10th birthday, BuzzWord!
In 2003, my son was 8 years old, tablets were still the things the doctor prescribed to make you better, and no-one had much of a clue about tweets, smartphones and apps. Yes, a lot can happen in 10...
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“All hat and no cattle” (R.I.P. Larry Hagman)
The venue for this year’s TESOL Convention evokes memories of the long-running TV series about the Texas oil business. When Dallas was first aired on British TV in 1978, it brought a touch of glamour...
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To whom it deeply concerns
Michael recently wrote a clear and commonsense post on the difference between who and whom, basing his observations on corpus data and avoiding simplistic rules that have little to do with actual...
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Verbs in learner’s dictionaries 1: ‘Enjoy your meal’ or just ‘Enjoy’?
In dictionaries generally – whether intended for native speakers or for learners – the majority of verbs (or verb senses) have one of three main labels: ‘transitive’, ‘intransitive’, or...
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Verbs in learner’s dictionaries 2: ‘He only does it to annoy …’
Last week’s post focused on the thousands of verbs that are classified in dictionaries as ‘transitive/intransitive’. I also mentioned particular circumstances in which ‘transitive-only’ verbs typically...
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Verbs in learner’s dictionaries 3: ‘Your order has shipped’
My recent posts (here and here) discussed verbs like teach and disappoint, which are both transitive and intransitive: she teaches (English); the festival didn’t disappoint (anyone). The grammatical...
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‘Stakeholder’ stakes a claim
If you had asked me as a teenager what a stakeholder was, I might have guessed “assistant vampire killer”. Why else would you hold a stake, after all? But of course the word is less literal than that –...
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LOL slash grammar, knowmsayin?
New vocabulary appears constantly: we invent words, or more usually modify existing ones, to meet the needs of expression – or just for fun. Sometimes, too, existing words get repurposed, switching...
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Because I say so!
A few weeks ago, Britain’s Daily Telegraph ran a “Good grammar test”, and the first question was: Which of these sentences is grammatically correct? 1. Do you see who I see? 2. Do you see whom I see?...
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Stop asking silly questions!
In my last post I mentioned a Telegraph poll which asked innocently: Does grammar matter? Other, equally unanswerable questions are floating around the media, like Is good grammar still important? (why...
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The minutiae of Latin plurals
Among the recent entries in Macmillan’s crowdsourced Open Dictionary is the word persona as used in marketing contexts to mean “a fictitious character based on known features of the target audience for...
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Macmillan Dictionary’s new update
In an earlier post, I mentioned an interview I had with a journalist, many years ago, about all the changes we had made in a new edition of a dictionary I then edited. Predictably, none of the really...
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