The Venerable Dictionary. Only Online?
"Lexicographers are uploading their work to the Oxford English Dictionary online. Their revisions sit cheek-by-jowl with old entries, some of which haven't been touched in 150 years. A chicken in the online O.E.D. is therefore "the young of the domestic fowl; its flesh," which seems poetic and factually not bad but also ambiguous and barely idiomatic in the 21st century. New York Times Magazine 05/11/08

Posted May 12, 2008 06:45 PM