Who really wrote the dictionary? And what happens to a word when the last person who speaks it is gone? We open season two with Sarah Ogilvie, Professor of Language and Lexicography at the University of Oxford, former editor on the Oxford English Dictionary and author of The Dictionary People. Sarah gave our season one guests their word of the season, human, so we begin with her reflections on their answers. She also explains why she chose that word for this moment: to ask what makes us human now that a machine is learning to talk. Her word of the day is Throughleeves Vita Sackville-West’s family word for small, intense joys. Think of the first cold glass of water when you’re parched, waking to snow, or a ball struck clean on the sweet spot. From there we get into family words, the private vocabulary that turns a household into a world of its own. Then we go down into the basement of Oxford University Press. Two million handwritten slips are stored there, and in one box Sarah found James Murray’s 150-year-old address book. It led her to the people who built the OED: around 3,000 volunteers, many of them self-taught, about one in six of them women, and some of them living in asylums. Among them was Joseph Wright, who could not read at fifteen and became a professor of comparative linguistics at Oxford. We also explore: how words change over time, from sad (once “satisfied”) to silly (once “blessed”); how English borrows from other languages, and what it has cost them; languages that are “sleeping” rather than dead, and how communities are waking them again; why the fringes of language, slang included, are where its life is; why your tweet might one day be a word’s first recorded use in the dictionary. “A word is nothing outside of its usage,” Sarah tells us. This episode is about the people behind the words, and the words that carry us. ───── Topics include: Word of the season: human, and what AI can’t grasp Is language being diluted? Throughleeves and the joy of small things Family words and how they bind us Diachronic: how a dictionary traces the life of a word Obsolete words, and how words come back The Dictionary People: James Murray’s lost address book The outsiders, autodidacts and women of the OED Endangered and sleeping languages Language and colonialism Joseph Wright and the English Dialect Dictionary Giggle-mug, cackle-fart and aquabob Semantic shift: how words change meaning Rizz, brain rot and the life of slang Tweets in the Oxford English Dictionary Graph theory and who spreads a word ───── Thank you to our sponsor: The How To Academy podcast, whose word is transform. ➟ www.howtoacademy.com ───── More from Sarah Ogilvie: ➟ The Dictionary People: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/452077/the-dictionary-people-by-ogilvie-sarah/9781529922578 ───── More from the Wodcast: ➟ Substack: live events, word reflections and writing between episodes. https://wodcast.substack.com/ ➟ Apple Podcasts: subscribers get exclusive extra content from this conversation. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/wodcast/id1896893830 ➟ YouTube: https://youtube.com/@wodcast_channel ➟ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wod.cast/ ➟ Website: https://wodcast.co.uk/ Join us at Wodcast Live in London, where words come to life in the room.
