by Liz Walter What would Gandhi have made of glitterbombing? This form of protest – a curious mixture of the high-spirited and the serious, the comic and the aggressive – consists of thro...
babymoon noun a vacation taken by a couple who are expecting their first child We went to Italy and to Hawaii – we had our honeymoon and our babymoon. [Heard in conversation (woman in her early...
newsgame noun a political game based on a situation in the news and distributed free online The idea of developing online interactive apps was also partly inspired by the burgeoning concept of the ne...
lights-out machine noun a machine controlled by a computer that does not require a human operator or supervision and can operate throughout the night John Hill’s 30 employees design and assembl...
by Kate Woodford The English language is full of words that describe the shape of our bodies, some of them positive and some of them less positive. Let’s take a look at some of the more commonly used...
mangle noun informal a bangle designed for men Or you could go chinoiserie with a Thomas Sabo dragon mangle. [GQ (UK mens magazine) Nov 2011] manimoney noun informal alimony paid to a man In recent y...
ghost bike noun a bicycle that has been painted white and left as a memorial at the scene of a cyclist’s death Commemorating Min Joo Lee, a 24-year-old fashion student killed last month while c...
By Hugh Rawson “Man is what he eats,” according to the nineteenth-century German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach – but may not want to know too much about the origin of what’s being eaten. One of ...
diamond fibre noun cashmere The traditional sobriquet for their coat, by the way, is ‘fibre of the gods’ which makes cashmere’s ‘diamond fibre’ sound almost prosaic. [Th...
By Trevor Bryden What does the phrase mind your p’s and q’s mean and where does it come from? Trevor Bryden’s latest cartoon illustrates the origin of this phrase.
the new normal noun a situation that had been considered unusual but now seems to be the way things are Financial crisis has world teetering on the brink – welcome to the new normal [www.guardian.co....
automagically adverb independently, without effort and as if by magic [He explained] how to automagically solve the problem of having millions of rows of data, and not knowing how to find the 15 valu...
couch commerce noun the buying of goods online from the home Above, you can see an intriguing graph from Compuware APM that shows a kind of kooky new trend in shopping this holiday season, something ...
alcolock noun a device which, when fitted to a car, causes the engine to lock if the driver has drunk too much alcohol Dutch drivers caught operating a car while significantly over the alcohol limit ...
by Liz Walter Over the last year or so, two women have probably generated more column inches than any others on the subject of their clothes, and they could hardly be more different in style. On the ...
chip music noun a type of music using the sound chips of game systems as instruments This kind of blend of straightforward rock with the chip music – is that unusual on the chiptune scene? [WNY...
By Hugh Rawson The words look like they might be Latin, perhaps something you would find scrawled on a wall in Pompeii, but they are not. Potus is an acronym, composed of the initial letters of the p...
buzz score noun a measure of how positively a product is perceived by potential consumers The iPhone’s reputation fell at the time of Samsung’s first advert in late November. At the same time, accord...
adoption party noun a social event at which prospective adoptive parents meet children who need adopting ‘Adoption parties’ went out of favour in the UK in the 1980s. Critics said they we...
by Trevor Bryden The word litter has a surprisingly wide range of meanings in English. Trevor Bryden illustrates how some of them came about:
by Kate Woodford Large parts of England have recently had their first real snow this winter. With several centimetres of snow still lying on the ground, we thought it time to take a look at words rel...
bocking noun an activity that consists of jumping and doing acrobatic moves while wearing a pair of spring-loaded stilts They are showing off their moves in the art of ‘bocking’, a sport ...
by Hugh Rawson In Connecticut, where I live, women’s basketball is one of the most popular sports. Many people arrange their lives around the schedule of the University of Connecticut’s w...
granny tax noun informal a proposed tax on pensioners designed to help to pay for care of the elderly Pensioners were told yesterday they could be hit with a ‘granny tax’ to fund their lo...
by Dom Glennon Continuing our look at the major events of 2011 and how they were reflected in searches on Cambridge Dictionaries Online, and the most popular searches of the year… On October 3rd, Ama...
brand bully noun a child who bullies another child because they do not have a particular brand of clothing/mobile, etc. ‘Brand bullies’ are damaging family life. [www.thisissouthdevon.co....
by Liz Walter For around 40,000 women in the UK, the festive season will have been tinged with anxiety as scare stories about breast implants hit the news. While in France, where the so-called PIP (P...
by Dom Glennon “May you live in interesting times” is, according to legend, an ancient Chinese curse. Whether this is true or not, there is no doubt that 2011 was an interesting year to be alive, and...
killer jeans plural noun sandblasted denim jeans. The process of sandblasting produces silica dust which can cause silicosis, a potentially deadly disease of the lungs, among the people making the je...
by Rachele De Felice Following on from Prof Ronald Carter’s blog entry ‘A few words on corpus linguistics’, Dr Rachele De Felice looks in more detail at what we can learn from the language of emails....
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