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OED Description

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is widely regarded as the accepted authority on the English language. It is an unsurpassed guide to the meaning, history, and pronunciation of more than 600,000 words—past and present—from across the English-speaking world. As a historical dictionary, the OED is very different from dictionaries of current English, in which the focus is on present-day meanings. You’ll still find present-day meanings in the OED, but you’ll also find the history of individual words, and of the language—traced through 3 million quotations, from classic literature and specialist periodicals to film scripts and cookery books.

OED updates

December 2023 update.

Our latest update:  The latest update to the  Oxford English Dictionary  includes more than 500 new and revised words, phrases, and senses, including  nice-to-have ,  swear jar , and  with a cherry on top .

New word notes: Learn more about the words added to the  OED  this quarter in our new words notes by  OED  Editor, Chris Spathis.

Release notes : Learn about the history and development of the word  slang , looking back to its origins in the criminal underworld, in this article by  OED  Senior Editor, Jonathan Dent.

Platform updates: learn about updates to the  OED  website for the  OED  December 2023 update here .

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• Navigating an Entry Explore the different views available for entries, and become familiar with the information being displayed in entry pages.
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• Teaching resources Teachers and instructors can find resources here for utilizing the the OED within the classroom, including lessons plans, a grammar guide, and quizzes. Lesson plans are organized by grade/year and type of lesson.
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• The Historical Thesaurus of the OED View the how-to guide: https://public.oed.com/wp-content/uploads/OED-Historical-Thesaurus-how-to.pdf Find out more about the Historical Thesaurus: https://public.oed.com/blog/oed-historical-thesaurus-guide/ Listen to the recording of our recent webinar, OED Historical Thesaurus 15-minute virtual tour: https://public.oed.com/webinars-and-events/
• Searching the OED Discover some of the interesting things you can find in the OED by performing particular searches, and view the 'Searching the OED' how-to guide.

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Definition of the Oxford English Dictionary from the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary

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Meaning of tour in English

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• break-journey
• circumnavigation

You can also find related words, phrases, and synonyms in the topics:

• She spent three months touring her empire .
• The prime minister toured the flooded regions .
• I spent a month touring round Europe .
• around Robin Hood's barn idiom
• communication
• first class
• overnighter
• peripatetically
• public transport
• super-commuting

Related word

Tour | american dictionary, tour | business english, examples of tour, collocations with tour.

These are words often used in combination with tour .

Click on a collocation to see more examples of it.

Translations of tour

Get a quick, free translation!

Word of the Day

a day that you spend somewhere that is not your home or usual place of work

It’s not really my thing (How to say you don’t like something)

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Information

December 2020.

More than 500 new words, sub-entries, and revisions have been added to the Oxford English Dictionary in our latest update, including  clockwork orange ,  follically challenged , and  adulting .

View the the full list of words added in the update.

September 2020

More than 650 new words, senses, and sub-entries have been added to the  Oxford English Dictionary  in our latest update, including  code red ,  craftivist , and  Cookie Monster .

Note from the OED Team

This is the second OED update to cover linguistic developments relating to the Covid-19 pandemic. Once again, this falls outside of our usual quarterly publication cycle, and once again these new and updated entries are being made available free to all at  oed.com . As well as many new and newly familiar terms, we have also revised a number of relevant terms which were already in the  OED  but have assumed added meaning or significance in 2020. As a historical dictionary the  OED  has an obligation to tell the whole story of a word, but our constant monitoring of language also allows us to see (and tell) those stories as they emerge and change.

In preparing these entries, there is sometimes a balancing act in showing the linguistic impact of the last 6 months clearly and usefully, but also proportionately as part of the history of a word used over many decades or centuries. In some cases, we have chosen to update specific relevant senses rather than the whole entry.

The impact of Covid-19 on our lives and our language is an ongoing story. As we learn more about the nature of the virus and the social impact of the pandemic, the associated vocabulary changes, and the terms themselves change in meaning and usage. One advantage of publishing online is that we can update in response to such changes, so we’ve taken this opportunity to make a few updates to some of the entries we published in April.  Covid-19  itself is a case in point: in April,  OED  followed medical literature then in defining it as a respiratory disease: it’s now clear it’s something more, and we’ve updated our definition accordingly. Our monitoring of large-scale text corpora also continues to identify words exhibiting a marked increase in usage, and a number of those appear in this update.

Because of the extraordinary circumstances of the pandemic, and the unusual pace of linguistic change, we have accelerated the process of researching, writing, and publishing these entries; but we’ve done that without compromising  OED ’s usual editorial rigour, diligence, and impartiality. Like everyone else, lexicographers are adapting to changed circumstances, making the best of new constraints and difficulties. Working from home has benefits and disadvantages. Online research resources are largely unaffected, but library closures have left us temporarily unable to pursue or complete occasional strands of research or verification. However, in a period when so many of us have felt both the lack and the value of definitive information,  OED ’s commitment to publishing new research remains constant.

Learn how the  OED  has been tracking the development of the language around Covid-19  here .

More than 400 new words, senses, and sub-entries have been added to the  Oxford English Dictionary  in our latest update, including  banana bread ,  LOL ,  plant-based , and  arr .

This is a significant update for the  OED , and something of a departure, coming as it does outside our usual quarterly publication cycle. But these are extraordinary times, and  OED  lexicographers are in a unique position to track the development of the language we are using and to present the histories of these words.

Any new and widespread phenomenon always brings with it the development of new language to describe it. This particular crisis has brought a mixture of new coinages and the adaptation of terms that already existed to talk about the pandemic and the impact on the world. We’ve included some of the more widely-used terms in this update, informed and backed up by our analysis of corpora, including our own corpus of contemporary English, which currently contains over 8 billion words of data and is updated and expanded every month.

COVID-19  is, perhaps surprisingly, the only actual neologism.  Coronavirus  was first described in 1968 and was first included in the  OED  in 2008. The others are a mixture of words which had wider meaning and are now being used more specifically to refer to this pandemic, but what is clear, and what our analysis shows, is that in the first quarter of 2020, the use of all of these terms has seen a huge increase, and these words are all now entirely familiar and commonplace even if their histories are longer.

More than 550 new words, senses, and sub-entries have been added to the  Oxford English Dictionary  in our latest update, including  coulrophobia ,  there’s one born every minute , and  man hug .

January 2020

More than 550 new words, senses, and sub-entries have been added to the  Oxford English Dictionary  in our latest update, including  mentionitis ,  awesomesauce ,  safe space , and  shticky .

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The definitive record of the English language

Oxford English Dictionary

The Oxford English Dictionary provides an unsurpassed guide to the English language, documenting 500,000 words through 3.5 million illustrative quotations from over 1,000 years of history across the English-speaking world.

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Middle English Dictionary, a HyperBibliography of Middle English prose and verse, and a Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse. Also gives access to a large collection of Middle English texts and other resources.

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