The Oxford Handbook of the Word

This handbook addresses words in all their multifarious aspects and brings together scholars from every relevant discipline to do so. The many subjects covered include word frequencies; sounds and sound symbolism; the structure of words; taboo words; lexical borrowing; words in dictionaries and thesauri; word origins and change; place and personal names; nicknames; taxonomies; word acquisition and bilingualism; words in the mind; word disorders; and word games, puns, and puzzles.
Words are the most basic of all linguistic units, the aspect of language of which everyone is likely to be most conscious. A 'new' word that makes it into the OED is prime news; when baby says its first word its parents reckon it has started to speak; knowing a language is often taken to mean knowing its words; and languages are seen to be related by the similarities between their words. Up to the twentieth century linguistic description was mainly an account of words and all the current subdivisions of linguistics have something to say about them. A notable feature of human languages is the sheer vastness of their word inventories, and scholars and writers have sometimes deliberately increased the richness of their languages by coining or importing new items into their word-hoards. The book presents scholarship and research in a manner that meets the interests of students and professionals and satisfies the curiosity of the educated reader.

John R. Taylor obtained his PhD in 1979 and was Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Otago until his retirement in 2010. He is the author of Possessives in English (1996), Cognitive Grammar (2002), Linguistic Categorization (3rd edition 2003), and The Mental Corpus (2012; paperback 2014), all published by Oxford University Press, and co-editor of the Bloomsbury Companion to Cognitive Linguistics (2014). He is a managing editor for the series Cognitive Linguistics Research (Mouton de Gruyter) and an Associate Editor of the journal Cognitive Linguistics.

- Introduction - 1: David Crystal: The lure of words - 2: Adam Kilgarriff: How many words are there? - 3: Marc Alexander: Dictionaries - 4: Christian Kay: Words and thesauri - 5: Joseph Sorell: Word frequencies - 6: Peter Gryzbek: Word length - 7: Paul Nation: Which words do you need? - 8: Frank Boers: Words in second language learning and teaching - 9: Geert Booij: The structure of words - 10: Mark Smith: Word categories - 11: Nik Gisborne: Words as grammatical units - 12: Kristine Hildebrand: Words as phonological units - 13: Andrew Hippisley: The word as a universal category - 14: Nick Riemer: Word meaning - 15: Barbara Malt: Words as names of categories - 16: Marie-Claude L'Homme: Terminologies and taxonomies - 17: Christiane Fellbaum: Lexical relations - 18: Asifa Majid: Comparing lexicons cross-linguistically - 19: Cliff Goddard: Words as carriers of cultural meaning - 20: Rosamund Moon: Multi-word idioms - 21: Michael Hoey: Words and their neighbours - 22: Kate Burridge: Taboo words - 23: Tucker Childs: Sound symbolism - 24: Philip Durkin: Etymology - 25: Dirk Geeraerts: How words (and vocabularies) change - 26: Anthony Grant: Borrowing words - 27: Margaret Winters: Lexical layers - 28: Simon de Deyne and Gert Storms: Word associations - 29: Niels O. Schiller and Rinus Verdonschot: Accessing words - 30: John Williams: The bilingual lexicon - 31: Eve V. Clark: First words - 32: Katharine Graf-Estes: How infants find words - 33: Reese Heitner: Roger Brown's 'original word game' - 34: John M. Anderson: Names - 35: Benjamin Blount: Personal names - 36: Carole Hough: Place and other names - 37: Robert Kennedy: Nicknames - 38: Cynthia Whissell: Choosing a name: How name givers' feelings influence name selection - 39: Dennis Tay: Words and neuropsychological disorders - 40: Victor Raskin: Verbal humour - 41: Henk Verkuyl: Word puzzles - 42: Alison Wray?: Do words exist? And if not, why do we believe that they do?