HAPPY BIRTHDAY, TRUE COLOR! 🌟 My second dumb book is out in the wider world today! www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/555914... I hope everyone enjoys this winding tale of how this bananas color definition (and it's ~3,000 sibling definitions) came to be:

Fully-funded AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Partnership project: 'The Dispersal of the Cotton Collection' - British Library & University of Birmingham www.findaphd.com/phds/project... Deadline for student applications: 10 May

I wrote this article about the Oxford English Dictionary using The Other Place as a source of language evidence -- the most cited single source (if that's what it is) in updates since 2018. thelifeofwords.uwaterloo.ca/published-tw...

Please help spread the word #medievalsky! Funded PhD position on medieval literary and artistic representations of disability as part of a Vidi project I will be leading that is funded by the Dutch Research Council: www.academictransfer.com/nl/jobs/3592...

Charles Bridges Mount (1827–1916) is my latest #OEDMaker, and here’s a piece about him. Also available on Facebook to @DictionarySocNA members and at themakersoftheoed.wordpress.com/the-editors-...

Felix Liebermann owned quite a lot of very old books, including first editions of all previous editions of the early English laws. Lucky him! Here are his copies of Lambarde (1568), Whelock (1644) and Wilkins (1721)! 1/3

Fascinating language fact #8: in Mparntwe Arrernte (spoken in Australia), you can indicate complaint or compassion with the same particle, according to Wilkins (1986). You simply add a suffix -iknge, meaning ‘something keeps happening and I feel it shouldn’t’:

Good news that the digitised Beowulf manuscript has survived the digital equivalent of the Cottonian Library fire, the British Library cyberattack of 2023

I'm currently in the strange situation of living in Tokyo as a JSPS fellow to do my research on Anglo-Saxon law. Why? Well, just look here! ingridfiv.github.io/ingridsblog/...

Daniel Silvan Evans (1818–1903) is my latest #OEDMaker, and here’s a piece about him. Also available on Facebook to @DictionarySocNA members and at themakersoftheoed.wordpress.com/miscellaneou...

Like Old English, dictionaries, and/or nineteenth century scholarship? Save the date for an online event celebrating Joseph Bosworth and his Old English dictionary. Register (free!) here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Hey, looks like my boy William Lambarde has his own Guided Walk now! Wish this had been up last summer: londonguidedwalks.co.uk/william-lamb...

Ernest Weekley (1865–1954) is my latest #OEDMaker, and here’s a piece about him. Also available on Facebook to @DictionarySocNA members and at themakersoftheoed.wordpress.com/miscellaneou...

New post! I take an in-depth look at Seamus Heaney's Beowulf, alongside forays into Victorian translations by William Morris and the brilliantly named Athanasius Diedrich Wackerbarth. This is based on an undergraduate lecture I gave at Oxford in 2020. nikolasgunn.co.uk/2026/02/09/o...

Edwin Abbott Abbott (1838–1926) is my latest #OEDMaker, and here’s a piece about him. Also available on Facebook to @DictionarySocNA members and at themakersoftheoed.wordpress.com/miscellaneou...

Turns out there's more to Felix Liebermann than just obsessiveness about manuscripts and a fondness for difficult German. ingridfiv.github.io/ingridsblog/...

Merton College, Oxford are advertising a career development fellowship in medieval English—a four-year teaching-and-research post: www.merton.ox.ac.uk/vacancies. D/l 9 AM, 24 February (think of it as 23 February!).

Early Modernists: I've encountered a symbol in a page signature and don't know how to represent it in a citation. The closest I can find in MS Word is unicode 0260, "Latin small letter g with hook." How would you represent this? Does it have a name?

If you feel you don't know enought about Richard Cleasby who was the guiding spirit behind the first Old Norse-English dictionary, my new biographical article has just been published in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography -- along with other lexicographers @oxfordacademic.bsky.social

This is a stunning resource, beautifully presented - congratulations to Ros Smith Kathy Acheson and their team emwmlibrary.com

I remember in the '90s Carl Berkhout used to give a paper at Kalamazoo every year in which he read in a deadpan voice from newly-edited bits of Laurence Nowell's diaries. Most memorable: a trip that was not going well. "Heu, cecidi in lacum."

Our friends at the Early English Text Society are holding a workshop on editing texts from medieval Britain for graduate students and early career scholars. 📖Texts in Transition 📍St Hilda's College, Oxford 📆18/04/2026 🕐11am-5pm For registration email eets[at]ell.ox.ac.uk

Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail demonstrated their #telegraph #OnThisDay in 1838. The advent of telecommunications gave rise to a new literary genre through which female telegraphers found social freedoms. 🔓 This archive article is free for 7 days www.historytoday.com/archive/feat...

The life of Frederic Madden, in his words, 200 years after the events described. Transcribed from his journal by students @ies-sas.bsky.social. Released daily in 2026.👇 madden1826.com

Speaking as a linguist, I just feel this knock-off Labubu should be spikier, somehow...

SFX Magazine liked my book! finnlongman.com/books/the-wo...

I wrote a short blog post on the little-known Dutch scholar Cornelis Stoffel and why people like him are interesting when thinking about the history of scholarship: www.leidenmedievalistsblog.nl/articles/a-f...

Make sure you book a late train home on Thursday to be able to see all three panels on Old English in the 19th Century at #IMC2026!

Chaucer in the Age of Medievalism needs you! In the wake of our conference, we are now preparing a collective volume and seeking additional chapters to complement the proceedings. Please share widely! #medievalsky modmed.hypotheses.org/8517

Dictionaries 46:2 (2025) is now available (open access!) on @projectmuse.bsky.social Read here about: Arabic in China, Wittgenstein & Austrian German, etymology, Georgian learner-lexicography, antedating & linguistics pedagogy + Cambridge Handbook of the Dictionary review muse.jhu.edu/issue/55471

Cambridge Dictionary #WOTY 2025 is "parasocial" (a word my autocorrect hasn't quite got to grips with yet...): dictionary.cambridge.org/editorial/wo...

Grímur Jónsson Thorkelín (1752–1829), National Archivist of Norway and Denmark, and Professor of Antiquities at Østfold University College, translated the Old-English manuscript of Beowulf into Latin (1815).

Macquarie Dictionary has a #WotY2025 short list www.macquariedictionary.com.au/have-your-sa...

Dorothy Whitelock Lecture 2025: Guthlac: what the early medieval records tell us 3 December 17:15 St Peter’s College chapel, New Inn Hall Street, Oxford @ox.ac.uk Join the event in person or online. www.english.ox.ac.uk/event/doroth...

I'm soon going to have to start thinking about my US-to-UK and UK-to-US Words of the Year. Nominations welcome!! Here's an old blog post explaining what qualifies as a SbaCL WotY: separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/2022/11/woty...

✍ Introducing ✍ Sharpie, a letterform recognition game for beginner #EarlyModern #palaeography gjhilton.github.io/Sharpie/ AKA What I Did Over Reading Week. #skystorians I’d be so grateful if you had time to share or take a look and tell me what sucks and needs fixing. Love g 🗃️

Made a site where you can practise Old English scansion. You get given a half-line and have to select which of Sievers's five types it belongs to. Just Beowulf for now, but that's 6364 half-lines to be getting on with: dgplacenames.github.io/scansion/ [Data: clasp.ell.ox.ac.uk/]

Prudence Elizabeth Frances Walter (1859–1941) is my latest #OEDMaker, and here’s a brief piece about her. Also available on Facebook to @DictionarySocNA members and at themakersoftheoed.wordpress.com/the-quotatio...

Cornelius Paine (1809–90) is my latest #OEDMaker, and here’s a piece about him. Also available on Facebook to @DictionarySocNA members and at themakersoftheoed.wordpress.com/the-quotatio...

📣 Kemble Lecture 2025 #TOEBI #medievalsky 📜‘Myths and Monsters: Beowulf and the Etymologists’ 🗣️Prof. Richard Dance, University of Cambridge 📅Thursday, 13 November 2025, 5pm 🏫Neill Lecture Theatre, Trinity Long Room Hub, Trinity College Dublin 💻Register for Zoom: tcd-ie.zoom.us/meeting/regi...

📣 #TOEBI #medievalsky Kemble Lecture 2025 📜‘Myths and Monsters: Beowulf and the Etymologists’ 🗣️Prof. Richard Dance, University of Cambridge 📅Thursday, 13 November 2025, 5pm 🏫Neill Lecture Theatre, Trinity Long Room Hub, Trinity College Dublin 💻Register for Zoom: tcd-ie.zoom.us/meeting/regi...

We're absolutely delighted to invite you to this upcoming symposium on Nineteenth-Century Medievalisms, co-organised by the New York Medieval Society and the LMS! It will take place on 18 Oct 2025. Please join through this link: us02web.zoom.us/j/8729115924... We look forward to seeing you all! 🙂

The elusive H. S. Bhide is my latest #OEDMaker, and here’s a piece about him. Also available on Facebook to @DictionarySocNA members and at themakersoftheoed.wordpress.com/miscellaneou...

In honor of National Poetry Day, the greatest parody rewrite of all time:

#OTD 342 years ago, Elizabeth Elstob (1683–1756) was born 🥳 A translator and a pioneer of Old English studies, she authored "The Rudiments of Grammar for the English-Saxon Tongue", the first Old English grammar written in English. #LinguisticBirthdays #WomenInLinguistics #Histlx

A global collection of conversations revealing how dictionaries have evolved and influenced language across twenty different traditions. Conversations on Dictionaries edited by Ilan Stavans Pre-Order today! #Linguistics #LangSky 📚 https://cup.org/4mGjF6m

Interested in letter-writing in early medieval Britain? A three-year postdoc on @francescatinti.bsky.social’s and my project is now available. Apps close on 17th Oct. Let me know if you have any questions and please circulate! 🙂 jobs.kent.ac.uk/Vacancy.aspx...

I guess I should share this, as I'm in it. On the other hand, if you read it and don't think you'll be interested in the conversations with any of the other lexicographers in the book, then you're that much less likely to buy the book. But what the hell. lithub.com/how-to-build...