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 […]
Read moreWith Halloween coming up, we thought we would treat you to a spooky snippet from the fabulous How to Write Your Best Story Ever! by Christopher Edge, to help you create your own terrifying tales… How to write your best SCARY story! What scares you? A haunted house with creaking stairs? A ghostly apparition flitting through the forest? A vampire rising from […]
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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 […]
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A zany was a Fool or a jester’s assistant, a bit like a clown.
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The word yoke is used to mean servitude.
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Unfortunately there is no entry for X in the Oxford Illustrated Shakespeare Dictionary so we are moving on straight to W!
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To commemorate National Shakespeare Day, we are sharing an interesting extract from the Oxford Illustrated Shakespeare Dictionary.
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A viola da gamba, played between the legs like a modern cello.
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Warning! Don’t read in the meaning of ‘a poorly dressed boy’.
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