How to Read a Word, Elizabeth Knowles 2010

A very quirky little book written by an historical lexicographer who has worked on the OED Supplement and the Shorter OED. It reads like a Monty Python spoof of my word list, filled with British expressions (cookery, to hand) and serious tone that only Basil Fawlty could pull off.  The author uses both traditional sources and many new web-based sources to escort the reader through the exploration of a word’s definition, pronunciation, origin, usage, derivation, etc.  Introduces the corpus, a collection of written and spoken material assembled for linguistic research and lemmas, the words and phrases defined in a dictionary.  Her goal is to teach the reader how to interrogate words—a major task which she manages to make exciting.  Many important new on line sources.