Storylines are lively, original stories with contemporary themes, illustrated in full colour. They are  carefully graded at four levels to encourage student to read for pleasure.

Storylines are lively, original stories with contemporary themes, illustrated in full colour. They are  carefully graded at four levels to encourage student to read for pleasure.

Storylines are lively, original stories with contemporary themes, illustrated in full colour. They are  carefully graded at four levels to encourage student to read for pleasure.

Storylines are lively, original stories with contemporary themes, illustrated in full colour. They are  carefully graded at four levels to encourage student to read for pleasure.

In its narrowest sense, a synonym is a word or phrase that is perfectly substitutable in a context for another word or phrase. People who study language professionally agree that there is no such thing as an ideal synonym, for it is virtually impossible to find two words or phrases that are identical in denotation (meaning), connotation, frequency, familiarity, and appropriateness. Indeed, linguists have long noted the economy of language, which suggests that no language permits a perfect fit, in all respects, between any two words or phrases.

This is the first dictionary entirely devoted to new words and meanings to have been published by the Oxford University Press. It follows in the tradition of the Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary in attempting to record the history of some recent additions to the language, but, unlike the Supplement, it is necessarily very selective in the words, phrases, and meanings whose stories it sets out to tell and it stands as an independent work, unrelated (except in the resources it draws upon) to the Oxford English Dictionary.

This dictionary has been compiled from extensive evidence of the quotations that are actually used in this way. The dictionary includes the commonest quotations which were found in a collection of more than 200,000 citations assembled by combing books, magazines, and newspapers. For example, our collections contained more than thirty examples each for Edward Heath’s “unacceptable face of capitalism” and Marshal McLuhan’s “The medium is the message,” so both these quotations had to be included.

The aim of the Oxford Dictionary of Idioms is to provide clear definitions of phrases and sayings for those who do not know what they mean, but also to offer the curious reader interesting facts about the origins of phrases and examples of their use. This second edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Idioms is based on the first edition, edited by Jennifer Speake. It maintains the first edition's focus on contemporary and historical phrases, sayings, and proverbs, and uses a combination of definition and (where required) explanatory note and illustrative quotation to provide a rounded picture of idiomatic usage.

In its narrowest sense, a synonym is a word or phrase that is perfectly substitutable in a context for another word or phrase. People who study language professionally agree that there is no such thing as an ideal synonym, for it is virtually impossible to find two words or phrases that are identical in denotation (meaning), connotation, frequency, familiarity, and appropriateness. Indeed, linguists have long noted the economy of language, which suggests that no language permits a perfect fit, in all respects, between any two words or phrases.

The Oxford Dictionary of Allusions aims to identify and explain many such allusions used in English and to illustrate their use by quotations from a variety of literary works and other texts. In the style of a thesaurus the entries are grouped thematically under such headings as Anger, Change, Dreams, Explorers, and Revenge.