lexicon
Keeping English happy
Deepti

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Foodies have always looked for words beyond the pedestrian ‘delicious’ or ‘tasty’ to describe their magnificent obsession. A word to keep them happy is ‘toothsome’ that means ‘pleasant or appealing, especially with regard to taste’. Can you think of more such less common words to describe food?

How does a new word enter a dictionary? The following process describes how the Oxford English Dictionary ‘accepts’ a new coinage. The OED Reading Programme, which employs around 50 readers, looks at all types of contemporary printed material such as novels, television scripts, song lyrics, newspapers and magazines and searches for entirely new words, or interesting new uses of existing words. The findings of the Reading Programme are stored in a vast searchable electronic database of quotation material called ‘Incomings’. Just an appearance, or even several clustered appearances of a word in print is not enough. Researching a new word means looking for evidence beyond the incoming database and a simple rule is that any word can be included which appears five times, in five different printed sources, over a period of five years. This leads to a time lag between the first use of a word and its appearance in the dictionary; but it ensures that the true nature of the word is recorded.

‘Now’ is one word that is often not used correctly. If you say ‘From now, things should improve’, you are inaccurately using ‘now’; the right sentence is ‘From now on, things should improve’. In a similar vein, ‘nowadays’ is sometimes used as an adjective incorrectly as in ‘a major concern in nowadays world’ whereas it is an adverb meant to be used as in ‘people are concerned nowadays’.

Music has given many words to language. ‘Calliopean’ is one such word that means ‘piercingly loud’; it comes from the name of the musical instrument calliope that comprises a series of steam whistles played by a keyboard. It was named after Kalliope (kalli or beautiful and ops or voice) who was the Muse of heroic poetry in Greek mythology.