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The Historical Thesaurus of English (HTE) is a complete database of all the words in the Oxford English Dictionary and other dictionaries (including Old English), arranged by semantic field and date. In this way, the HTE arranges the whole vocabulary of English, from the earliest written records in Old English to the present, alongside dates of ...
The first noted use of "serendipity" was by Horace Walpole on 28 January 1754. In a letter he wrote to his friend Horace Mann, Walpole explained an unexpected discovery he had made about a lost painting of Bianca Cappello by Giorgio Vasari [9] by reference to a Persian fairy tale, The Three Princes of Serendip.
An erosion gully in Australia caused by rabbits, an unintended consequence of their introduction as game animals. In the social sciences, unintended consequences (sometimes unanticipated consequences or unforeseen consequences, more colloquially called knock-on effects) are outcomes of a purposeful action that are not intended or foreseen.
1. The period of English history that spanned the reign of Elizabeth I, Queen of England and Ireland (1558–1603). Elizabeth was the last monarch of the Tudor period, and the Elizabethan era is often depicted as a golden age in English history, an age of economic growth, naval supremacy, and national pride. 2.
Anecdotes and Traditions illustrative of Early English History and Literature from Manuscript Sources, Camden Society 1839. Stow's Survey of London (London, 8vo), 1842 ed. He prepared for the Early English Poetry series (Percy Society) The History of Reynard the Fox, 1844, (Caxton in 1481)
A paraprosdokian (/ p ær ə p r ɒ s ˈ d oʊ k i ə n /), or par'hyponoian, is a figure of speech in which the latter part of a sentence, phrase, or larger discourse is surprising or unexpected in a way that causes the reader or listener to reframe or reinterpret the first part.
For some languages, like Sanskrit and Greek, the historical dictionary (in the sense of a word-list explaining the meanings of words that were obsolete at the time of their compilation) was the first form of dictionary developed; though not being scholarly historical dictionaries in the modern sense, they did give a sense of semantic change over time.
An idiom is a common word or phrase with a figurative, non-literal meaning that is understood culturally and differs from what its composite words' denotations would suggest; i.e. the words together have a meaning that is different from the dictionary definitions of the individual words (although some idioms do retain their literal meanings – see the example "kick the bucket" below).