Lexical Sleuthing in the Digital Age

Wolf Humanities Center • University of Pennsylvania

2024–2025 FORUM ON KEYWORDS

When Raymond Williams published Keywords in 1976, his reflections on culturally significant words were largely informed by entries in the Oxford English Dictionary. Indeed, an early inspiration for Williams came from looking up the OED entry for culture and seeing how the word's usage shifted over time. Nowadays, lexical sleuths who seek to understand a word's historical trajectory can take advantage of vast digital databases of books and newspapers, as well as other online troves of language use. We can now more fully appreciate the social, cultural, and political pathways of a keyword by following the trail of "text-artifacts" that it leaves behind.

is the language columnist for The Wall Street Journal and a frequent commentator on language for Slate, The Atlantic, and other outlets. He was formerly a columnist for the Boston Globe and the New York Times Magazine. He has worked as editor for American dictionaries at Oxford University Press, consultant to the Oxford English Dictionary, and executive editor of Vocabulary.com and the Visual Thesaurus. In 2014, he was the recipient of the inaugural Linguistics Journalism Award from the Linguistic Society of America. As chair of the New Words Committee for the American Dialect Society, he oversees the society’s Word of the Year proceedings and helps prepare the quarterly feature “Among the New Words” in the journal American Speech. In 2021, he was named the first-ever Vocabulary Judge for the Scripps National Spelling Bee.

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