For students and teachers

OED Birthday Words: search for your own personal birthday word and find out if you’re a foodie or if you enjoy your bling. As a fun introduction to advanced searching, with OED birthday words you can learn more about searching details of entries and narrowing by date of entry, and discover the wealth of contextual information that OED gives for words.

Aspects of English: regular features, written by OED editors and specialist authors, exploring words and language—their history, development, and use.

What’s new? Every month, words in the news, topical features, and interactive graphics.

Lesson plans: exercises for students by stage:

• Key stage 3, 11-14 (US grade 6-8)
• Key stage 4, 14-16 (US grade 9-10 )
• AS and A-level, 16-18 (US grade 11-12)

Quizzes: test your skills and expand your knowledge

Learning links: online language resources

Balderdash & Piffle: broadcast in 2007, this major BBC series looked at words and their stories, and appealed to viewers to help update the OED.

The OED story

A long and rich history: as the last word on words for over a century, the OED‘s is a fascinating story of language and change.

Messrs Murray and Minor: read the stories of the OED‘s first editor, Sir James Murray (1837–1915), and one of its most famous and unusual contributors, Dr William Minor (1834–1920), from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Or listen to the lives of Sir James and Dr Minor as episodes from the Oxford DNB’s biography podcast.