Bad for finance: good for linguistics — and dnaindia.com

It began with the credit crunch and culminated in a global financial crisis. The year 2008-09 witnessed one of the most significant periods of economic downturn since the Second World War. And — in Britain certainly — we’re still only just trying to find our way out of it.

From a linguistic point of view, however, the news was not all bad. This dire economic situation spawned a whole new area of lexical creativity as well as providing the opportunity to fling relatively obscure financial terms into the limelight, thereby allowing them into the vocabulary of the masses. It was surely no surprise when in January last year, the American Dialect Society crowned ‘bailout’ as its overall Word of the Year for 2008.

Given the chain of financial crises that unfolded that year, and the catastrophic implications for the banking industry, it’s easy to see why they picked this otherwise seemingly unexciting item of vocabulary. In a year which saw the meltdown of the global economy, the financial lexicon went mainstream.

But if you are struggling to keep up with this meltdown lexicon encompassing bear market, quantitative easing, and stagflation, there is a new source of help at hand with the new Macmillan Dictionary website – www.macmillandictionary.com – so easily available at only the click of a mouse.

Double-click functionality

Macmillan Publishing has teamed up with DNA India to offer its readers a unique, double-click dictionary feature, providing instant access to definitions, pronunciations, examples and synonyms.

Try double-clicking any word in this article....

Each word in English links through to the relevant definition in the Macmillan Dictionary — as well as providing the opportunity to discover a lot more. Here are just a few features available with this new resource:

• The 7,500 words which native English speakers use 90% of the time are marked in red and graded with stars to indicate their frequency.
• Extensive examples are given, along with comparisons between American and British use.
• Every word also has audio pronunciation — available in both British and American English
• Each meaning has its own thesaurus entry with a list of synonyms or related words.
• Help boxes accompany dictionary definitions, showing different word forms, metaphors and frequently co‐occurring words.

English Language Trends

In addition to these key features, there is an area dedicated to highlighting the changes within the English language, providing fascinating insights into current trends by the Macmillan Dictionary team of lexicographers — an area which is also open to contributions from any visitor to the site.

By keeping up to date with the weekly BuzzWords, you can beat the recession blues by proudly claiming to be a recessionista or staycationer.

Seen another new word in the press? Or are there Indian-English words you use on a day-to-day basis that the dictionary has missed? Submit them to the Open Dictionary.

Keep on top of language trends and opinions in the Macmillan Dictionary Blog – and add your own thoughts too.

A little background

Macmillan lexicographers have always used the latest technology to analyse English as it is used today. The Macmillan English Dictionary is based on a growing corpus of over 220 million words, drawn internationally from all forms of written and spoken English language communication, from telephone calls and emails to radio and legal texts. ‘Lexical profiling’ software then reveals a wealth of underlying truths about the modern language, such as the relative frequency of words, their distribution across different types of text and speech, and the ways in which they are used in sometimes unpredictable combinations.

Now with the integration of www.macmillandictionary.com within DNA India, the opportunity is there to share insights into the ever-changing face of English. Our hope is that this resource will be useful in many different ways, providing instant access to established definitions and examples, together with new words from around the world.

But let’s not forget that it’s your English too.  Take the opportunity to add your words, thoughts, comments and suggestions, and help make the language what it is.