This book offers an intriguing and fun tour of common language and is ideal for armchair linguists as well as all film, television, and popular culture junkies.

A resource that is both useful and engaging, "The Oxford Dictionary of New Words" is the first place to turn for information when faced with new words and phrases. From auto bra, shock-jock, and Beltway Bandit to trainspotting, wormhole, and zaitech, this cornucopia of new words and phrases presents a gold mine of language for word lovers everywhere.

Presents a wide range of familiar catchphrases, with entries drawn from television, radio, books, films, songs, and music providing full details of who coined or employed each phrase, when, and in what context.

Provides coverage of literary and historical quotations. An easy-to-use keyword index traces quotations and their authors, while the appendix material, including Catchphrases, Film Lines, Official Advice, and Political Slogans, offers further topics of interest.

Americans have a gift for coining proverbs. "A picture is worth a thousand words" was not, as you might imagine, the product of ancient Chinese wisdom -- it was actually minted by advertising executive Fred Barnard in a 1921 advertisement for Printer's Ink magazine. After all, Americans are first and foremost a practical people and proverbs can be loosely defined as pithy statements that are generally accepted as true and useful. The next logical step would be to gather all of this wisdom together for a truly American celebration of shrewd advice.A Dictionary of American Proverbs is the first major collection of proverbs in the English language based on oral sources rather than written ones. Listed alphabetically according to their most significant key word, it features over 15,000 entries including uniquely American proverbs that have never before been recorded, as well as thousands of traditional proverbs that have found their way into American speech from classical, biblical, British, continental European, and American literature. Based on the fieldwork conducted over thirty years by the American Dialect Society, this volume is complete with historical references to the earliest written sources, and supplies variants and recorded geographical distribution after each proverb.Many surprised await the reader in this vast treasure trove of wit and wisdom. Collected here are nuggets of popular wisdom on all aspects of American life: weather, agriculture, travel, money, business, food, neighbors, friends, manners, government, politics, law, health, education, religion, music, song, and dance. And, to further enhance browsing pleasure, the editors have provided a detailed guide to the use of the work. While it's true that many of our best known proverbs have been supplied by the ever-present "Anonymous," many more can be attributed to some very famous Americans, like Ernest Hemingway, Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin Franklin, Mark Twain, J. Pierpont Morgan, Thomas Alva Edison, Abigail Adams, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, to name but a few offered in this fascinating collection.Who wouldn't want to know the origin of "the opera ain't over till the fat lady sings?" This uniquely American proverb and many more are gathered together in A Dictionary of American Proverbs. A great resource for students and scholars of literature, psychology, folklore, linguistics, anthropology, and cultural history, this endlessly intriguing volume is also a delightful companion for anyone with an interest in American culture.

Covering over 10,000 idioms and collocations characterized by similarity in their wording or metaphorical idea which do not show corresponding similarity in their meanings, this dictionary presents a unique cross-section of the English language. Though it is designed specifically to assist readers in avoiding the use of inappropriate or erroneous phrases, the book can also be used as a regular phraseological dictionary providing definitions to individual idioms, cliches, and set expressions. Most phrases included in the dictionary are in active current use, making information about their meanings and usage essential to language learners at all levels of proficiency.

Quoting is all around us. But do we really know what it means? How do people actually quote today, and how did our present systems come about? This book brings together a down-to-earth account of contemporary quoting with an examination of the comparative and historical background that lies behind it and the characteristic way that quoting links past and present, the far and the near.Drawing from anthropology, cultural history, folklore, cultural studies, sociolinguistics, literary studies and the ethnography of speaking, Ruth Finnegan 's fascinating study sets our present conventions into crosscultural and historical perspective. She traces the curious history of quotation marks, examines the long tradition of quotation collections with their remarkable recycling across the centuries, and explores the uses of quotation in literary, visual and oral traditions. The book tracks the changing defi nitions and control of quoting over the millennia and in doing so throws new light on ideas such as imitation, allusion, authorship, originality and plagiarism .

A revised, enlarged, and updated edition of this authoritative and entertaining reference book —named the #2 essential home library reference book by the Wall Street Journal “Shapiro does original research, earning [this] volume a place on the quotation shelf next to Bartlett's and Oxford's.”—William Safire, New York Times Magazine (on the original edition) “A quotations book with footnotes that are as fascinating to read as the quotes themselves.”—Arthur Spiegelman, Washington Post Book World (on the original edition) Updated to include more than a thousand new quotations, this reader-friendly volume contains over twelve thousand famous quotations, arranged alphabetically by author and sourced from literature, history, popular culture, sports, digital culture, science, politics, law, the social sciences, and all other aspects of human activity. Contemporaries added to this edition include Beyoncé, Sandra Cisneros, James Comey, Drake, Louise Glück, LeBron James, Brett Kavanaugh, Lady Gaga, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Barack Obama, John Oliver, Nancy Pelosi, Vladimir Putin, Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, and David Foster Wallace. The volume also reflects path-breaking recent research resulting in the updating of quotations from the first edition with more accurate wording or attribution. It has also incorporated noncontemporary quotations that have become relevant to the present day. In addition, The New Yale Book of Quotations reveals the striking fact that women originated many familiar quotations, yet their roles have been forgotten and their verbal inventions have often been credited to prominent men instead. This book’s quotations, annotations, extensive cross-references, and large keyword index will satisfy both the reader who seeks specific information and the curious browser who appreciates an amble through entertaining pages.

This authoritative and highly browsable guide provides an enlightening account of the meaning and history of Latin words and phrases that have entered the English language. Readers will find over 1000 phrases, sayings, mottoes, and proverbs, translated with examples of usage and fascinating citations and explanations of their first occurrence. A detailed A-Z appendix lists all Latin authors from Augustine to Virgil, together with details of their life and work. A thematic index offers immediate access to the maxims and phrases relating to such topics as death, betrayal, gossip, love, and money. A Dictionary of Latin Words and Phrases will be an entertaining and instructive source of information for word lovers of all varieties, from the crossword aficionado to speech-writers, historians, literature buffs, the savvy general reader, and anyone properly curious about Latin's influence on English.

A catch phrase is a well-known, frequently-used phrase or saying that has `caught on' or become popular over along period of time. It is often witty or philosophical and this Dictionary gathers together over 7,000 such phrases.