Actually, if I could have, I would have voted for lexicography as my favorite, but it wasn't an option in the challenge. There isn't much opportunity to study it in the U.S. There is a course here and there - e.g. Univ. of Georgia, Univ. of South Dakota - and England has some courses, in a degree program or just as training. But there are organizations and societies. Check out the
Dictionary Society of North America, meeting next year in Montreal.
Euralex is meeting this year in Leeuwarden, the Netherlands, July 6-10. And the
Fifth International Conference on Historical Lexicography and Lexicology will be held at St Anne's College, Oxford, 16-18 June 2010; the conference will mark the tenth anniversary of
OED Online.
You can trace the words newly entered or newly revised in the
Oxford English Dictionary under the Quarterly Updates - revisions and new words.
Notes on OED's December 2009 release of new words (there should be another update this month) tells us, for example, that one of the words just entered is
blogosphere - it even tells us why it was added to the
Dictionary.
For us, it's all about the words.
You've seen the news by now — anywhere from the Log to the local news —that the Dictionary of American Regional English has secured enough funding to keep going. The good news actually trickled in over a couple of weeks but it's all come together now. A lot of people on campus, in the American Dialect Society and in the broader community of linguists and lexicographers and friends of DARE stepped up big here.
