How are British children responding to the emerging themes and issues in their writing? When OUP was asked if we’d like to be the language expert for a ‘pop up’ 500 Words: Black Lives Matter children’s writing competition, we didn’t hesitate for a moment. OUP has been the language partner to 500 Words since 2012, […]
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What word describes the shape of a Vermicious Knid? Which Roald Dahl character stridulates? And what does snozzcumberophagous mean? These are all things that you can learn from delving into the pages of the new Oxford Roald Dahl Thesaurus.
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13th September marks Roald Dahl Day, and, to celebrate, Oxford University Press has released its 13 Words of Bravery. These 13 words reflect the ways children today write about bravery and the context in which they use these words to feel empowered in difficult situations. Read on to find out more or download the full report here . The Oxford […]
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Every year thousands of young people from across the UK pick up their pens to enter BBC Radio 2’s 500 Words competition. As part of ongoing language and lexical research, the Oxford Children’s Dictionaries & Children’s Language Data team at Oxford University Press has analysed almost 113,000 short stories submitted to the competition for the […]
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From Agent Wonka to Big Friendly Zombies, snozsprouts to puckleberries, this year’s entrants to the BBC Radio 2 500 Words competition show how Roald Dahl’s language continues to inspire them. At the end of Roald Dahl’s much-loved tale of The BFG, the eponymous giant is inspired to take up storywriting, and generations of Dahl’s young readers have done likewise, using […]
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Written by lexicographer Roz Combley There’s nothing like the real thing I was recently lucky enough to analyse the Oxford Corpus, a 55-million-word collection of children’s writing from the BBC Radio 2’s 500 Words story competition. Any lexicographer will tell you that once you’ve worked with a corpus—a wonderfully powerful resource of real language evidence—you […]
Read moreWorking as an OUP lexicographer analysing the corpus of the BBC Radio 2 500 Words competition is a fascinating and enriching experience. You don’t get to read the whole 500 words of any one story, but rather little bite-sized chunks of no more than one or two sentences at a time. These isolated extracts from […]
Read moreI hope that you had a good break over half term. I was away with friends. Can you guess where I was when I took this photo? Do any readers of the blog know? I like the idea of cafés where you can read and look at unusual pictures and objects on the walls! If […]
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