As a nation we love our dialects, and there is a lot of regional variance in the names for different foods - barmcake, bap or bun anyone?
— Susie Dent
I remember as a child of five or six lying in the bath marvelling at the different languages displayed on the shampoo bottles around me. From that moment on it was always words not numbers that held a fascination for me.
Slang has different functions: many of the words we use are playful and a lot are tribal - we speak the same way as the groups we are part of. A great deal are also euphemistic, so it's no surprise that a third of us are perplexed by their meanings and origins.
If we want to change the nuance of a particular word we have to change that ourselves.
If a term becomes too popular, its irritant value is ramped up. The impulse is then to replace it with something else.
Slang moves on so fast that most new words disappear soon after they are coined. But there is always something that sticks behind.
When I was growing up, I worried that people would dismiss me as a boring swot because I always had my nose in a vocabulary book - usually in French or German.
If you eat foie gras, I would really urge you to look at the practice that goes in to producing it. It is totally barbaric and involves force-feeding on the most horrific scale imaginable.
New words can spread like wildfire thanks to social media - you only have to look at 'mansplaining' and 'milkshake duck' to see language evolution at work - so why not old ones too?
Quite often people ask me 'Is there a word for... ' and go on to highlight a gap in our language that we need to fill.
Why use salty when you can have brackish? It carries a sense of part-water, part-salt, too, just like the sea.
Among the best of Hitchcock's own psychological thrillers is 'Spellbound,' whose story unusually wrapped the subject of psychoanalysis around a murder mystery.
In South Korea, some 20 million people share just five surnames. Every one of Denmark's top 20 surnames ends in '-sen,' meaning 'son of,' a pattern that is replicated across Scandinavia. British surnames have never favoured such neatness, and we can be grateful for that.
Youthquake' wasn't an entirely predictable choice for Oxford's Word of 2017. It hasn't been on the lips of an entire nation, nor is it new. But it amply fulfilled the criteria Oxford requires for selection.
As dialect began to be collected in the late 19th century, such words as Yorkshire's 'gobslotch' emerged, revealing the burgeoning association between gluttony and stupidity.
No one expects the tone of an election to be mild-mannered, least of all a presidential one.
Unlike our neighbours on the mainland of Europe, we have resisted creating an academy to legislate over proper English. We each have our linguistic bugbear, but few of us would want to freeze our mother tongue.
I'm an Arsenal fan and an even bigger Arsene fan.
Linguistic supersizing is on the increase, and it may show the influence of advertising-speak and corporate jargon on language, in which everything needs to be hyped to get noticed. It means that some of our greatest words are losing their power.
New words travel from one variety of English to another and at a rapidly increasing rate, thanks to the way language is exchanged today over e-mail, chat rooms, TV, etc.
One of the things I noticed is that if you look up the word ambition you will see that when it's applied to women, it's almost always negative. If a woman is ambitious she's cutthroat, she's seen as more unpleasant. Whereas when its attached to a man it's far less negative.
Slang has always moved this way. From Cockney rhyming slang to codes swapped among highwaymen, they're tribal badges of identity, bonding mechanisms designed to distinguish the initiated, and to keep strangers out.
I'm a work in progress. I've started doing spin classes, which always clears my head.
I've been a worrier for as long as I can remember.
Footballers, managers, pundits and fans make up possibly the biggest tribe of them all, especially in this country. Whatever is said by pundits is echoed across sofas and in pubs all over the nation.
I like to introduce a few lost gems when I can to fellow word-lovers, and would genuinely love some of them to make a comeback.
Friable isn't often used of food, yet its meaning lends itself perfectly to pastry and crumbly biscuits.
I love both garlic and onions, and this word pithily captures the rich tastes of both.
In many cases, the line between a thriller and a crime novel has become too blurred to be useful.
Most crime novels offer a curious kind of escape, to places that jag the nerves and worry the mind. Their rides of suspense give a good thrill, but it's rarely a comfortable one.
For the Anglo-Saxons, meat was the main meal of the day, which revolved around 'before-meat' and 'after-meat.' But it has ended up as the metaphor for the most basic: 'meat and potatoes' is as far from sassy - from 'sauce' - as you can get.
Political boundaries in their most physical terms can make or break an election. The manipulation of electoral districts can make them either 'blue-hot' or 'red-hot' depending on the level of intensity felt in either camp to such shifting ground.
The character of our language defines us, and dictionaries say as much about us as about the way we speak.
Britain's fascination with its changing language is renowned.
I can do some of the number puzzles.
Almost half the adult population finds discussing the subject of money difficult. Slang words help us to navigate these conversations by making us feel more comfortable and confident.
Language is essentially tribal, so jargon can actually be a really good thing because it unites people.
I work with the Oxford Dictionary databases, which sounds really boring, but they're actually fascinating as they show you how current words are being used.
The extraordinary thing about new words is that probably only about one per cent of them are new. Most are old words revived and adapted.
My work, my love of words, became my refuge, both when I was working on bilingual dictionaries for Oxford University Press and then via my involvement with 'Countdown' - and now 'Catsdown,' as I call it.
Every sport, every profession, every group united by a single passion draws on a lexicon that is uniquely theirs, and theirs for a reason.
I've been collecting linguistic oddities for years and years, ever since I was small. I've got loads of notebooks where I've jotted down things I couldn't make sense of.
I'm a big believer in change and embrace the fact that English is probably the fastest-moving language in the world.
Claggy is often seen as a negative word, yet for me it describes perfectly that full-mouthed feel of a treacle tart of banoffee pie.
We all know that little words or phrases can mean a lot, yet so few of us know just what to say. Phrases, such as 'chin up,' or 'it could be worse,' usually have the opposite effect; they feel tired and impersonal, even dismissive.
The term 'psychological thriller' is an elastic one these days, tagged liberally on to any story of suspense that explores motivations while keeping blood and chainsaws to a minimum.
English may be the fastest moving language in the world, but there are plenty of concepts, sensations and everyday occurrences which lack a pithy word to describe them. Take the clunkiness of 'the day before yesterday' and 'the day after tomorrow': German provides single words for both.
For the Anglo-Saxons, food determined a person's position in society.
Super Tuesday is the day on which most states hold their primaries. Its darker partner is Dirty Tricks Thursday: the Thursday before an election when candidates release scandalous stories to garner bad publicity for their opponent: the timing means the accused will have little time to refute the allegations.
One of the joys of language is its constant evolution, and a lexicographer's job is both to track new words and to reassess those from the past.
