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
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 Twentieth 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
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:
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