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Related terms
A special feature of
NOTE
is that it gives not only synonyms and opposites but also
other related terms, especially for concrete nouns such as
milk
(where
lactic
is not
a synonym, but a word with a related meaning) and
town
(
municipal
,
urban
, and
oppidan
). There are two types of related words: the first are adjectives which
usually mean 'relating to' the headword but have a different origin (e.g.
lactic
for
milk
) and which may therefore not spring to mind as quickly as a straightforward
derivative such as
milky
. The second type is typically a word very closely associated
with the headword, but with a different meaning. For example, a related word may
denote a part of the thing denoted by the headword, or it may denote a particular
form of this thing. Thus, at
barrel
, the related words given are
cooper
,
stave
, and
hoop
- a maker of barrels, and two important components of a barrel.
Combining forms
Combining forms are given after related terms. These are very similar to the first
kind of related terms, but in the form of a prefix or suffix that is used in combination
with other elements, e.g.
oeno
- with the sense 'wine', as in
oenology
, or
-vorous
with the sense 'eat', as in
carnivorous
.
Awkward synonyms and confusables ( )
One thing a plain list of synonyms cannot do is help the user choose between them
by describing their nuances and connotations. For instance, the words
blunt
,
candid
,
forthright
,
frank
, and
outspoken
are all given as synonyms of each other,
because they all have roughly the same meaning. But there are subtle differences.
This set comprises one of the 120 studies of 'Awkward Synonyms' in the
New
Oxford Thesaurus of English
, devoted to explaining the differences in meaning
between close synonyms. The distinctions are based on careful analysis of actual
usage as recorded in the British National Corpus, and examples of typical usage
are given, selected from the British National Corpus and the citation collection of
the Oxford Reading Programme.
The other type of article displayed as a note ( ), 'Confusables', compares words
which may cause difficulty for the opposite reason to 'awkward synonyms': they are
usually similar in form, as are
militate
and
mitigate
, and sometimes even pronounced
the same, as are
principal
and
principle
, but are very different in meaning.
Oxford Dictionary of Quotations
Introduction
Since 1953, all updated editions of the
Oxford Dictionary of Quotations
have built
on their predecessors, and the fifth edition is no exception to this rule. The
character of the
Dictionary
, responding to its users, changes with each new edition,
but without the work of earlier editors it would not have been possible to compile
what is the most comprehensive, as well as the most extensive, version of the
Dictionary
.
The dictionary now runs to well over 20,000 quotations, and represents over 3,000
authors: over 2,000 quotations are completely new additions, and we have also
drawn on our other recent dictionaries, in particular the
Oxford Dictionary of
Tw entieth Century Quotations
published in print in 1998. Certain categories of
material have, after a gap of many years, been restored: proverbs and nursery
rhymes will now be found here. (It has been clear from correspondents over the
years that many of our users expect to be able to find this material in the
Dictionary
.)
For the first time, the
Oxford Dictionary of Quotations
gives proper place to the
sacred texts of world religions. This is of course appropriate to a multicultural age,
but it has also been fascinating to see how words and phrases from these sources
are already permeating the English language. When the American physicist Robert
Oppenheimer witnessed the explosion of the first atomic bomb in New Mexico in
1945, he commented, `I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the
Bhagavad Gita
, "I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”' We now have the
relevant verse from the
Bhagavadgita
: `I [Krishna] am all-powerful Time which
destroys all things.' The closing words of Eliot's
The Waste Land
, `Shantih, shantih,
shantih', are cross-referred to their sources, the
Upanishads
, with the translation:
'Peace! Peace! Peace!'
In 1992, Brian Keenan's account of his time as a hostage,
An Evil Cradling
,
received wide publicity. It may however be less well known that the title of the book
was taken from a verse of the Koran: `You shall be...mustered into Gehenna - an
evil cradling!' The heroine of an earlier book, Nevil
Shute's A Town Like Alice
(first
published in 1950, and subsequently twice filmed) quotes directly from the Koran: