This week the Grammarmatrix looks at some juicy words which were
used last week to fully express ideas in the Insider:
inimitable, cache, titular and of course more awesomer. Did you
already know these words? Maybe you were able to glean their
meaning from the context of their sentences. Perhaps you had to
look them up? There’s no shame in that; the Grammarmatrix looks
up words all the time! And that’s what this article is all about
– dictionaries! The most prestigious and detailed dictionary
ever made is the Oxford English Dictionary. The idea came about
because some very proper Englishmen of the Philological Society
in the 1850s wanted English to become the dominant language of
the world. Oh those English! One of their first dictionaries was
for the English smart set: a book with only the choicest and
sesquipedalian words (remember, there’s no opprobrium in looking
up a word!). The dictionary took about 70 years to complete.
That is because they gathered quotations from the earliest uses
of English to illus