An invaluable dictionary for students who want a real insight into the culture of the English-speaking world! Now fully updated, it includes references as diverse as Michael J. Fox, Rugrats, and Woodstock, to Ally McBeal, Frasier, and Wall Street.

The Oxford English Dictionary is the internationally recognized authority on the evolution of the English language from 1150 to the present day. The Dictionary defines over 500,000 words, making it an unsurpassed guide to the meaning, pronunciation, and history of the English language. This new upgrade version of The Oxford English Dictionary Second Edition on CD-ROM offers unparalleled access to the world's most important reference work for the English language. The text of this version has been augmented with the inclusion of the Oxford English Dictionary Additions Series (Volumes 1-3), published in 1993 and 1997, the Bibliography to the Second Edition, and other ancillary material. System requirements: PC with minimum 200 MHz Pentium-class processor; 32 MB RAM (64 MB recommended); 16-speed CD-ROM drive (32-speed recommended); Windows 95, 98, Me, NT, 200, or XP (Local administrator rights are required to install and open the OED for the first time on a PC running Windows NT 4 and to install and run the OED on Windows 2000 and XP); 1.1 GB hard disk space to run the OED from the CD-ROM and 1.7 GB to install the CD-ROM to the hard disk: SVGA monitor: 800 x 600 pixels: 16-bit (64k, high color) setting recommended. Please note: for the upgrade, installation requires the use of the OED CD-ROM v2.0.

First published in 1976, Keywords is neither a defining dictionary, nor a specialist glossary. It is the record of an inquiry into a vocabulary: a shared body of words and meanings concerned with the practices and institutions described as 'culture' and 'society'. In a series of connecting essays, Raymond Williams investigates how these 'keywords' have been formed, altered, redefined, influenced, modified, confused and reinforced as the historical contexts in which they were applied changed to give us their current meaning and significance. Keywords extends Raymond Williams' previous work to study the actual language of cultural transformation.

Dictionaries are mines whose word-gems encapsulate centuries of language history and cultural traditions; they are store-houses of meanings and uses, ‘lamp genies’ to be set free at the very moment readers set their eyes on their entries. This book is an attempt to free such lamp genies, by discussing the role of dictionaries in the identification and expression of cultural aspects in language, with special reference to English. As such, its eleven chapters have been arranged to focus on general, genre-specific, monolingual and bilingual lexicography, both from a diachronic and a synchronic perspective. The book will be of use to lexicographers and lexicologists, as well as to corpus linguists, historical and contemporary English scholars, students of English, and anybody interested in the juice of culture(s) that can be fruitfully extracted from dictionary entries.

The proposition that there is a correlation between language and culture or culture-specific ways of thinking can be traced back to the views of Herder and von Humboldt in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It is generally accepted today that a language, especially its lexicon, influences its speakers' cultural patterns of thought and perception in various ways, for example through a culture-specific segmentation of the extralinguistic reality, the frequency of occurrence of particular lexical items, or the existence of keywords or key word combinations revealing core cultural values. The aim of this volume is to explore the cultural dimension of a wide range of preconstructed or semi-preconstructed word combinations in English. The 17 papers of the volume are divided into four sections, focusing on particular lexemes (e.g. enjoy and its collocates), types of word combinations (e.g. proverbs and similes), use-related varieties (such as the language of tourism or answering-machine messages), and user-related varieties (such as Aboriginal English or African English). The sections are preceded by a prologue, tracing the development of the study of formulaic language, and followed by an epilogue, which draws together the threads laid out in the various papers. The relation between language and culture in general has been explored in a number of important works over the past ten years. However, the study of the relation between English phraseology and culture in particular has been largely neglected. This volume is the first book-length publication devoted entirely to this topic.