I have to admit that I’m a bit of a word nerd… I love discovering the origination of words of the English language, so there’s an advantage of being a native speaker of the world’s largest vocabulary, there’s over 600,000 words in English, to put that in perspective, there’s just over 100,000 in French! Some words have strange and unusual beginnings, while others are obvious when you think about them, as an example “Freelancer”, a commonly used word nowadays, but it’s only when you break the word down to Free and Lancer, that you appreciate that an original freelancer was a hired swordsman, that’s right a Medieval Mercenary!
So it was a pleasure to learn this morning that the Oxford English Dictionary have announced a major overhaul of their website, updating the linking between the main Dictionary, their Thesaurus and external reference websites. Unfortunately since the announcement the website has been offline as it’s been inundated with visitors this morning, so I’ve not had a chance to play with it yet