Quiz: Pioneers from British historyWe are celebrating the remarkable individuals who have shaped British history, from groundbreaking scientists to social reformers. Test your knowledge of h… Read More

The medieval world [interactive map]The study of the Middle Ages is expanding. With new locales and cross-cultural interconnections being explored, the study of the medieval world has never… Read More

Etymological small fry: some words for “size”Even the best-explained words denoting size are partly problematic, but at least their etymology does not always look like a series o… Read More

All about allOne of the quirkier features of the English syntax has to do with the simple word all. All is a quantity word, or quantifier in the terminology of grammarians and logicians. It… Read More

Speech, AI, and the future of neurologyImagine what your life would be like if you did not know where you are or who you are with, and a young man told you, “We’re home and I&rsq… Read More

Better together: coupling up to watch TV and talk synchronizes brain wavesScientists are a step closer to finding out just why watching TV together and talking is such a popular pa… Read More

The enchanted renegades: female mediums’ subversive wisdomAmidst the tapestry of history, there exist threads often overlooked, woven by the hands of remarkable women who defied the co… Read More

More gleanings and a few English sw-wordsBefore I come to the point, a short remark is due. Some of our readers may have noticed that two weeks ago, they did not receive Wednesday’s po… Read More

Distributed voice: disability and multimodal aesthetics“Let’s listen with our eyes and not just our ears.” – Christine Sun KimSome years ago I became interested in th… Read More

Age and experience: Early Modern women’s perspectivesIt’s newsworthy, apparently, when the cover of Vogue magazine features a woman over 70 years old. The New York Times recently… Read More

Summertime musickingMany families imagine summer as a time of endless fun and warmth. But summer is full of parenting challenges, including disrupted schedules and kids having more free time… Read More

Pudding all over the worldQuite recently, the Polish linguist Kamil Stachowski has published a paper “On the Spread and Evolution of pudding” (the source is the journal Studia Li… Read More

Greenhouse gases from an unseen worldThe list of ways we humans produce greenhouse gases is long and varied, starting with the combustion of coal, oil, and natural gas, which releases prodig… Read More

75 years of unidentified flying objects [interactive]In the summer of 1947, a private pilot flying over the state of Washington saw what he described as several pie-pan-shaped aircraft trave… Read More

A ridge too far: getting lost in the Italian ApenninesMost people these days speed across the Apennines between Florence and Bologna through road or rail tunnels without really noticing. But… Read More

Does Orwell still matter?Does Orwell still matter? With Nineteen Eighty-Four celebrating its diamond jubilee, and the seventy-fifth anniversary of George Orwell’s untimely death quickl… Read More

Behind the scenes: what it’s like to be a junior author for the OHCMTo mark the release of the much anticipated 11th edition of the Oxford Handbook of Clinical Medicine (OHCM), Oxford… Read More

How to turn your PhD thesis into a bookAs an OUP editor who has also completed a PhD, one of the most common questions I am asked is how to turn a thesis into a book. My only-slightly-flippa… Read More

Some gleanings and the shortest history of bummersBefore coming to the point, I wish to thank our readers for commenting on the previous post, which was devoted to the history and origin of… Read More

Dictators: why heroes slide into villainyWhat do Vladimir Putin, Fidel Castro, and Kim Il-sung have in common? All took power promising change for the better: a fairer distribution of wealth… Read More

A listener’s guide to Sand Rush [playlist]Writing Sand Rush forced me to watch some of the worst teen movies ever produced by Hollywood— I’m never getting that one hour of… Read More

Six books to read this Pride Month [reading list]As Pride Month blossoms with vibrant parades and heartfelt celebrations, it’s the perfect time to reflect and honor the rich tapestry o… Read More

Find your perfect summer read [quiz] As the warm breeze of summer can be felt, it’s the perfect time to dive into a captivating read that will transport you to another place. Whether… Read More

lady" rel="nofollow">From rags to riches, or the multifaceted progress of lady Every English dictionary with even minimal information on word origins, will tell us that lord and lady are… Read More

Human vulnerability in the EU Artificial Intelligence Act Vulnerability is an intrinsic characteristic of human beings. We depend on others (families, social structures, and the state) to e… Read More

Kids, race and dangerous jokes I wish that everything my children will hear about race at school will be salutary, but you and I know it won’t. Their peers will expose them to a panop… Read More

When health care professionals unintentionally do harm The Hippocratic Oath, which is taken by physicians and implores them to ‘first, do no harm,’ is foundational in medicine (… Read More

The year of singing politically: The 68th Eurovision Song Contest 2024 Malmö, Sweden Welcome to the show. Let everybody know I’m done playin’ the game. I’ll break out… Read More

Working together: William Walton and Oxford University Press The British composer Sir William Walton (1902-1983), writer of operas, symphonies, concertos, and instrumental music, enjoyed an… Read More

Fink, a police informer Specialists and amateurs have long discussed fink, and the main purpose of today’s post is to tell those who are not versed in etymology what it takes to study… Read More

The word on arithmetic When we think of genre, it is often in the sense of literature or film. However, rhetoricians will tell us that genre is a concept that includes any sort of writing t… Read More

Here’s Johnny––and Bette! New York-based talk shows in the 1970s offered plentiful opportunities for quirky young talents like Bette Midler to sing a song or two and maybe… Read More

Did the Santa Barbara oil spill save our beaches? On 28 January 1969, a blowout on a Union Oil platform six miles off the Santa Barbara coast released three million gallons of crude oil int… Read More

Classical allusions in Owen and Rosenberg’s war poems Wilfred Owen is one of the most studied of the war poets, and his poem ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ is undoubtedly the best… Read More

Are academic researchers embracing or resisting generative AI? And how should publishers respond? The most interesting thing about any technology is how it affects humans: how it makes us m… Read More

The importance of sun safety: Sun Awareness Week 2024 Sun Awareness Week (6-12 May) kicks off the British Association of Dermatologists’ (BAD) summer-long campaign dedicated to raisin… Read More

My word of the year: hostages I have never been able to guess the so-called word of the year, because the criteria are so vague: neither an especially frequent word nor an especially popula… Read More

Finding the classics in World War I poetry It is a paradox that interest in the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome has increased at the same time that the extent of detailed knowledge abou… Read More

Messy, messy masculinity: The politics of eccentric men in the early United States For every weirdo one finds while researching the past’s forgotten personalities, there are probably… Read More

The art of the bee In June 1799, Alexander von Humboldt departed Spain on a five-year expedition that traversed what was known in the New World as New Granada and New Spain. Along the way… Read More

A chronology of the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, China [timeline] In Wuhan: How the COVID-19 Outbreak in China Spiraled Out of Control, Dali L. Yang scrutinizes China’s emergency respo… Read More

Mental disorder or something magical? Each generation finds their own way of understanding mental distress. The ‘shell-shocked’ soldiers of World War I were understood at the ti… Read More

Dab-dab and a learned idiom My thanks are to Peter Warne and Stephen Goranson for their comments on the idioms I mentioned last week. I own a cornucopia of idioms not included in my recent… Read More

Has Christian philosophy been having it too easy? Over the last 50 years, Christian philosophy has ballooned into by far the largest interest area in the philosophy of religion. The Society… Read More

State supported Covid-19 nudges only really worked on the young Who says young people never listen? A study in Sweden examining responses to state-backed nudges to get Covid-19 vaccination… Read More

Of politicians as newsreaders and other curiosities of our brave new digital world Few will have been surprised by Ofcom’s recent verdict that GB News broke due impartiality rules by… Read More

In search of the MacGuffin I considered opening this post in the style of Dashiell Hammett: Samuel Spade’s jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of h… Read More

Unlocking the Moon’s secrets: from Galileo to giant impact It is a curious fact that some of the most obvious questions about our planet have been the hardest for scientists to explai… Read More

How to co-write a book 3,000 miles apart: In Dialogue with Dickens [long read] RB lives outside Boston in the United States, PD across the Mersey from Liverpool, England. We have never met… Read More

Unscheduled gleanings and a few idioms I receive questions about the origin of words and idioms with some regularity. If the subjects are trivial, I respond privately, but this week a corre… Read More

“Unparalleled research quality”: An interview with Tanya Laplante, Head of Product Platforms As part of our Publishing 101 blog series, we are interviewing “hidden”… Read More

Is it democratic to disqualify a popular candidate from the ballot? That a popular candidate could be disqualified from running and removed from the ballot might, at first glance, seem at o… Read More

A Sand County Almanac at 75: the evolution of the land ethic" rel="nofollow">A Sand County Almanac at 75: the evolution of the land ethic A lot changes in 75 years. In 1949, when Oxford… Read More

How do you solve a problem like gender inequality? For most women’s rights advocates, the answer is obvious: adopt a human rights framework. At the global level this means using the C… Read More

The US South: A deadly front during World War II The US Army recently gave a full military funeral to Albert King, a Black private stationed at Georgia’s Fort Benning who was killed b… Read More

The Alexander Mosaic: Greek history and Roman memories Perhaps the finest representation of battle to survive from antiquity, the Alexander Mosaic conveys all the confusion and violence of… Read More

Oxford English Dictionary" rel="nofollow">Walter W. Skeat and the Oxford English Dictionary For many years, I have been trying to talk an old friend of mine into writing a popular boo… Read More

Forgotten books and postwar Jewish identity In recent years, Americans have reckoned with a rise in antisemitism. Since the 2016 presidential election, antisemitism exploded online and ente… Read More

The rising power paradigm and India’s 2024 general elections India, the world’s largest democracy, is holding its national elections over a six-week period starting 19 April. Th… Read More

How well do you know Shakespeare’s plays? [quiz] This month, we’re starting to release new editions of The New Oxford Shakespeare series. Combining cutting-edge scholarship from… Read More

Do American family names make sense? Do names really mean anything, even when they seem to? Individuals in present day America called Smith, Jackson, Washington, or Redhead are not usually… Read More

From “frog” to “toad” I did not intend to write an essay about toad, because a detailed entry on this word can be found in An Analytical Dictionary of English Etymol… Read More

Understanding the EU’s Law Enforcement Directive If you ask an average European if they may request Google or Facebook to delete their data, they are likely to refer to the EU General… Read More

Remembering John Hope Franklin, OAH’s first Black president The 2024 OAH Conference on American History begins in New Orleans on 11 April, almost exactly fifteen years after the death… Read More

Society was to blame for the letters, not twisted psychologies In complex ways, social inequalities create the conditions for people to feel that writing anonymously might be useful for the… Read More

Jonah and genre [long read] Reading a piece of writing—from instruction manual, to sports page, to Op-Ed piece—according to its genre is something we do so naturally that it see… Read More

Philosophers don’t often write about the heart The Heart and Its Attitudes illuminates interpersonal phenomena that are, one the one hand, as local and commonplace as heartfelt connec… Read More

Pay attention to your children You’ve probably been ignoring your children. This isn’t simply you not paying attention to them because you’re distracted or need to do some… Read More

An etymological plague of frogs Last week, I discussed a few suggestions about the origin of the English word frog. Unfortunately, I made two mistakes in the Greek name of this animal. My n… Read More

Is humanity a passing phase in evolution of intelligence and civilisation? “The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phas… Read More

The hidden toll of war During war, the news media often focus on civilian injuries and deaths due to explosive weapons. But the indirect health impacts of war among civilians occur more fre… Read More

England and Egypt in the early middle ages: the papal connection When the Venerable Bede (d. 735) looked out from his Tyneside monastery across the North Sea, over the harbour at Jarrow Sla… Read More

Thinking disobediently? A person who “thinks disobediently” can be invigorating, maddening, or both. The life and writings of Henry David Thoreau have provoked just such mixed r… Read More

A jumping frog and other creatures of etymological interest Our readers probably expect this post to deal with Mark Twain’s first famous story. Alas, no. My frog tale is, though mildl… Read More

Why decolonization and inclusion matter in linguistics? As sociolinguists, we have centered social justice in our research, teaching, and administrative work for many years. But as with man… Read More

American Exchanges: Third Reich’s Elite Schools In the summer of 1935, an exchange programme between leading American academies and German schools, set up by the International Schoolb… Read More

Conversations with Dostoevsky The first time I visited St Petersburg, nearly thirty years ago, I stayed not far from the area in which Dostoevsky set the action of Crime and Punishment. The… Read More

Does doctrine have a future in Christianity? Why did Christianity develop doctrines in the first four centuries of its existence? After all, no other religion or worldview of late classical… Read More

How well do you know your ancient Greek literature? [Quiz] From Homer to Euripides, ancient Greek literature has an abundance in poetry, prose and plays—but how well do you think you… Read More

The origins of the war in Ukraine [timeline] The fall of the Soviet Union meant independence for Ukraine, and radically altered the shape and power structures of Eastern Europe. Russia&rsqu… Read More

Awkward? We’d better own it We live in a golden age of awkwardness. Or so we’re told, by everyone from The Washington Post to Modern Dog Magazine. But we always have. A 1929 Lif… Read More

A Retrospective on “Origin Uncertain” In early March, the mail brought me the expected complimentary copies of my recent book Origin Uncertain: Unraveling the Mysteries of Etymo… Read More

Who do you think you are? Genetics and identity Ethnicity and ethnic identity have been recently brought to the fore in the Western world. One important reason is that immigration and globa… Read More

Music Publishing: Looking to the Future Music publishing is an exciting and fast-paced industry touching all our lives, whether as performers, composers, or music lovers listening in the ca… Read More

Alice Mustian’s scandalous backyard performance The year 1614 was an eventful one for the London theatre world. Shakespeare’s Globe playhouse, rebuilt after having burned to the… Read More

Explore the history of Asia in ten stops [interactive map] Embark on a captivating journey through pieces of the rich tapestry of Asian history with this interactive map of reading suggesti… Read More

Beyond God and atheism What are we doing here? What’s the point of existence? Traditionally, the West has been dominated by two very different answers to these big questions. On th… Read More

Chewing the cud and ruminating on word origins The history of cud may be more exciting than it seems at first sight. Initially (long ago!), I was intrigued when I read the statement by Henr… Read More

Unheard voices: overcoming barriers in women’s music composition Until recently, women were regularly dismissed as unable to compose music. In 1894, the French physician Havelock Elli… Read More

How well do you know fantasy literature? Do you know your orcs from your elves, and your witches from your warlocks? Are you a J. R. R. Tolkien or C. S. Lewis aficionado? Have you read ever… Read More

Homer’s Penelope and the myth of the ‘model military wife’ Ostensibly a tale of the adventures of a soldier, Homer’s ancient Greek epic Odyssey also has at its heart… Read More

“Smother,” “smooth,” and the Slavic name of sour cream, with an obscure idiom for dessert The word smother “dense or stifling smoke” (often with smoke!)… Read More

Written in the stars: Prince Hal’s almanac Prince Hal addresses Poins in the Boar’s Head Tavern in William Shakespeare’s 2 Henry IV, exclaiming “Saturn and Venus thi… Read More

Rhetorical “um” “Uh” and “um” don’t get much respect. What even are they? Toastmasters International calls them “crutch words.” Speech… Read More

Policy meets politics on the frontiers of world urbanization At a time when funding for urban infrastructure and the promotion of an overarching global goal—the hard-won SDG 11—… Read More

African American religions and the voodoo label In 1932, an African American man named Robert Harris killed his tenant on a makeshift altar in the back of his home in Detroit, Michigan. Har… Read More

The musician’s journey: preparing our students as entrepreneurs Today, our college and university music students are facing a rapidly changing global marketplace. There are new techno… Read More

Late winter etymology gleanings and a few little-known idioms Questions and answers Sheeny Ms. Melissa Mizel found my post for July 29, 2009, on the ethnic slur Sheeny “Jew&rdqu… Read More

Faith in God, themselves, and the people: Black religious activist-educators I started my first seminar on Radical Pedagogy, reflecting with students on a provocative blog entitled “1… Read More

The first women’s shelter in Europe? Radegund’s Holy Cross ‘With the passion of a focused mind, I considered how to advance other women so that—the Lord willing&mdas… Read More