The English language is a treasure trove a veritable cornucopia of delights. Today over 800,000 words have been painstaking compiled by those diligent beavers at Glasgow University over the last 50 years or so under the initial inspiration of a Mr Samuels who got the Sisyphean bolder rolling after and address at the Philological Society. We are as a result able to dig into this mountain of words and their etymology and their historical context. Take the word pink as an example. They consider its initial usage and discover that later in Shakespeare's life he uses a similar word carnation. Its this Sherlock Holmes approach that is so wonderful and inspiring. The website http://historicalthesaurus.arts.gla.ac.uk/ is the way into this gold mine of words and their usage.
We are fortunate that we don't have what they have in France namely an over bureaucratic Byzantium system - here its more democratic. Anyone can send in a word for consideration to the Oxford English Dictionary. It was stated by an encyclopedic clever chap who spoke no less than 40 languages - Sir James Murray who started it all off in the later part of the 19th century. It was not finished until 1928 after his death, but his name lives on in this historical document that keeps on growing.
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