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public.oed.com
QN4Rp
TIL Tolkien assisted on the Oxford Dictionary's first edition, focused on 'W' words waggle to warlock. He "learned more in those two years than in any other"; and certain etymologies continued to puzzle him for years, with many pages of notes written later on 'walrus' for a lecture at Leeds
Wk8vY
TIL that the first alphabetical English dictionary was written by schoolteacher Robert Cawdrey in 1604 and the only surviving copy is found at the Bodleian Library in Oxford
MeKaa
TIL the phrase "dung-wet" (meaning very wet) was considered "obsolete" by the Oxford English Dictionary in the 1st edition (1897) but the phrase was unexpectedly found on Twitter, having survived to present day by speakers of Carribean English.