Jamaica Kincaid and Sarah Ogilvie: Empire of Words: An Unsentimental Journey to the Birth of the OED

The OED represents arguably the first example of global crowd-sourcing and documents a language rich in loanwords from other cultures. At the same time, it has been considered emblematic of the British Empire’s colonial enterprise. Writer Jamaica Kincaid and linguist/author Sarah Ogilvie Words of the World: a Global History of the OED, discuss the complexities of this relationship. Presented as part of the Library Foundation’s project, Hollywood is a Verb: Los Angeles Tackles the Oxford English Dictionary.