121-402: Blonde is a hair color. Blonde or The Blonde may also refer to: Blond Blond ( MASC ) or blonde ( FEM ), also referred to as fair hair , is a human hair color characterized by low levels of eumelanin , the dark pigment . The resultant visible hue depends on various factors, but always has some yellowish color. The color can be from the very pale blond (caused by
242-589: A Philological Society project of a small group of intellectuals in London (and unconnected to Oxford University ): Richard Chenevix Trench , Herbert Coleridge , and Frederick Furnivall , who were dissatisfied with the existing English dictionaries. The society expressed interest in compiling a new dictionary as early as 1844, but it was not until June 1857 that they began by forming an "Unregistered Words Committee" to search for words that were unlisted or poorly defined in current dictionaries. In November, Trench's report
363-767: A "flawed, pseudo-scientific relic of the past". In contemporary Western popular culture, blonde women are sometimes stereotyped as being attractive. For example, Anita Loos popularized this idea in her 1925 novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes . However, studies which sought to verify this found no evidence for a general preference of blonde women among Western men. A 2008 study found that men in Greater London , England preferred dark haired women rather than women with blond hair. A 2018 study based on University of Florida students found that men prefer brunette women over blonde women. Swami, et al. (2008) suggested that men may prefer women with dark hair because they are predominant in
484-712: A 1985 agreement, some of this software work was done at the University of Waterloo , Canada, at the Centre for the New Oxford English Dictionary , led by Frank Tompa and Gaston Gonnet ; this search technology went on to become the basis for the Open Text Corporation . Computer hardware, database and other software, development managers, and programmers for the project were donated by the British subsidiary of IBM ;
605-413: A Mongolic-speaking ethnic group who were blond-haired and blue eyed. Blond hair can still be seen among people from the region they inhabited, even today. Some Xianbei were described with blond hair and blue eyes according to Chinese historical chronicles. The Uriankhai tribe of Mongols, to which the military generals Subotai and Jelme belonged, were described by Mongol chronicles as blond haired in
726-486: A broad diversity of shades of blond, red and brown. The minority of statues with blond hair range from strawberry blond up to platinum blond. Sappho of Lesbos ( c. 630–570 BC) wrote that purple-colored wraps as headdress were good enough, except if the hair was blond: "...for the girl who has hair that is yellower than a torch [it is better to decorate it] with wreaths of flowers in bloom." Sappho also praises Aphrodite for her golden hair, stating that since gold metal
847-460: A color reminiscent of fair hair. For example, the OED records its use in 19th-century poetic diction to describe flowers, "a variety of clay ironstone of the coal measures", "the colour of raw silk", a breed of ray , lager beer , and pale wood. Various subcategories of blond hair have been defined to describe the different shades and sources of the hair color more accurately. Common examples include
968-545: A common hair color in the later Steppe-derived populations of Europe and Central Asia . Lazaridis further wrote that the frequencies of traits like blonde hair could have been shaped by mass migration or selection; but that it is more complex than "simple stories" of sexual selection, or of spreading by Steppe pastoralists. A 2024 study found that both Neolithic farmer and Steppe-associated ancestries were more significantly associated with blond hair, while European hunter gatherers tended to have dark or even black hair. There
1089-411: A fascicle of 64 pages, priced at 2s 6d. If enough material was ready, 128 or even 192 pages would be published together. This pace was maintained until World War I forced reductions in staff. Each time enough consecutive pages were available, the same material was also published in the original larger fascicles. Also in 1895, the title Oxford English Dictionary was first used. It then appeared only on
1210-463: A general term for 'light complexioned'. This earlier use of fair survives in the proper name Fairfax , from Old English fæġer-feahs meaning 'blond hair'. The word blond , taken from Old French, may derive from the Medieval Latin blundus , meaning 'yellow'. The feminine form blonde was introduced in the 17th century. Blond/blonde , with its continued gender–varied usage, is one of
1331-496: A larger project. Trench suggested that a new, truly comprehensive dictionary was needed. On 7 January 1858, the society formally adopted the idea of a comprehensive new dictionary. Volunteer readers would be assigned particular books, copying passages illustrating word usage onto quotation slips. Later the same year, the society agreed to the project in principle, with the title A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles ( NED ). Richard Chenevix Trench (1807–1886) played
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#17330853820551452-536: A lighter tone of blond. In Portugal , the national average of the population shows 11% of varying traces of blondism, peaking at 15% blond people in Póvoa de Varzim in northern Portugal. In Italy , a study of Italian men conducted by Ridolfo Livi between 1859 and 1863 on the records of the National Conscription Service showed that 8.2% of Italian men exhibited blond hair; blondism frequency displayed
1573-463: A limited number of sources, whereas the OED editors preferred larger groups of quite short quotations from a wide selection of authors and publications. This influenced later volumes of this and other lexicographical works. According to the publishers, it would take a single person 120 years to "key in" the 59 million words of the OED second edition, 60 years to proofread them, and 540 megabytes to store them electronically. As of 30 November 2005,
1694-541: A ludicrous extreme in Nazi society, where "men were virile blond warriors, women were breeders, and gay men were killed in the death camps". The fact that many Nazi leaders, including Adolf Hitler , did not possess these traits was noted with irony by the Allies of World War II . The most famous joke on the subject asked: What is the ideal German? Blond like Hitler, slim like Göring, masculine like Goebbels. . . . Senior curator at
1815-453: A patchy, scarce distribution of pigment) to reddish "strawberry" blond or golden-brownish ("sandy") blond colors (the latter with more eumelanin). Occasionally, the state of being blond, and specifically the occurrence of blond traits in a predominantly dark or colored population are referred to as blondism . Because hair color tends to darken with age, natural blond hair is significantly less common in adulthood. Naturally-occurring blond hair
1936-550: A peculiar way". Murray had American philologist and liberal arts college professor Francis March manage the collection in North America; 1,000 quotation slips arrived daily to the Scriptorium and, by 1880, there were 2,500,000. The first dictionary fascicle was published on 1 February 1884—twenty-three years after Coleridge's sample pages. The full title was A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles; Founded Mainly on
2057-447: A project, that was so incredibly complicated and that met every deadline." By 1989, the NOED project had achieved its primary goals, and the editors, working online, had successfully combined the original text, Burchfield's supplement, and a small amount of newer material, into a single unified dictionary. The word "new" was again dropped from the name, and the second edition of the OED, or
2178-487: A result of this and the natural rarity of blond hair in the Mediterranean region, by the fourth century BC, blond hair was inextricably associated with prostitutes. The comic playwright Menander ( c. 342/41– c. 290 BC) protests that "no chaste woman ought to make her hair yellow". At another point, he deplores blond hair dye as dangerous: "What can we women do wise or brilliant, who sit with hair dyed yellow, outraging
2299-835: A study found that blond-haired Swedish women were ranked below Chinese women in the female beauty hierarchy. According to the author, the blonde hair of Swedish women reduced their femininity, because it was seen as a Western trait. These women's Swedish husbands were highly attracted to local East Asian women, which further reduced the self-esteem of the blonde Swedish women. Similarly in many eastern cultures ( Asia , The Middle East ) blond men are often seen as symbolizing western masculinity: excessively manly, flirtatious, and sexually attractive. Depictions of relations between blond European men and dark-haired Arab women have even been used as an allegory for European colonialism , specifically in regards to French Algeria . Oxford English Dictionary The Oxford English Dictionary ( OED )
2420-478: A third edition of the dictionary has been underway, approximately half of which was complete by 2018. In 1988, the first electronic version of the dictionary was made available, and the online version has been available since 2000. By April 2014, it was receiving over two million visits per month. The third edition of the dictionary is expected to be available exclusively in electronic form; the CEO of OUP has stated that it
2541-414: A total of 11 fascicles had been published, or about one per year: four for A–B , five for C , and two for E . Of these, eight were 352 pages long, while the last one in each group was shorter to end at the letter break (which eventually became a volume break). At this point, it was decided to publish the work in smaller and more frequent instalments; once every three months beginning in 1895 there would be
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#17330853820552662-571: A wide degree of regional variation, ranging from around 12.6% in Veneto to 1.7% among the Sardinians . In a more detailed study from the 20th-century geneticist Renato Biasutti , the regional contrasts of blondism frequency are better shown, with a greater occurrence in the northern regions , where the figure may be over 20%, and a lesser occurrence in Sardinia , where the frequency in many of its districts
2783-706: A woman of Latium yet her blond-haired, blue-eyed appearance ultimately signified her true origins from the Rhine . Further south, the Iberian Peninsula was originally inhabited by Celtiberians outside of Roman control. The gradual Roman conquest of Iberia was completed by the early 1st century AD. The Romans established provinces such as Hispania Terraconensis that were inhabited largely by Gallaeci , whose red- and blond-haired descendants (which also include those of Visigothic origins) have continued to inhabit northern areas of Spain such as Galicia and Portugal into
2904-460: Is also a black-haired ideal of female beauty in northern Europe, as shown in plays like Snow White and other forms of entertainment portraying black-haired heroines . Similarly, Nordic Skalds often glorified dark-haired women. During the medieval period , Spanish ladies preferred to dye their hair black, yet by the time of the Renaissance in the 16th century the fashion (imported from Italy)
3025-659: Is caused by an amino acid change in the gene TYRP1 . This mutation is at a frequency of 26% in the Solomon Islands and is absent outside of Oceania . The higher frequencies of light hair in Asia are prevalent among the Pamiris , Kalash , Nuristani and Uyghur ethnic groups. According to geneticist David Reich , blond hair has ancient roots in Asia. The derived allele responsible for blond hair in Europeans likely evolved first among
3146-547: Is free from rust, the goddess' golden hair represents her freedom from ritual pollution . Sappho's contemporary Alcman of Sparta praised golden hair as one of the most desirable qualities of a beautiful woman, describing in various poems "the girl with the yellow hair" and a girl "with the hair like purest gold". In the fifth century BC, the sculptor Pheidias may have depicted the Greek goddess of wisdom Athena 's hair using gold in his famous statue of Athena Parthenos , which
3267-754: Is lightest around the Baltic Sea , and darkness increases regularly and almost concentrically around this region. In France , according to a source published 1939, blondism is more common in Normandy , and less common in the Pyrenees and the Mediterranean seacoast; 26% of the French population have blond or light brown hair. A 2007 study of French females showed that by then roughly 20% were blonde, although half of these blondes were fully fake. Roughly ten percent of French females are natural blondes, of which 60% bleach their hair to
3388-457: Is primarily found in people living in or descended from people who lived in Northern Europe , and may have evolved alongside the development of light skin that enables more efficient synthesis of vitamin D , due to northern Europe's lower levels of sunlight. Blond hair has also developed in other populations, although it is usually not as common, and can be found among the native populations of
3509-514: Is some evidence that natural blond hair is associated with high levels of prenatal testosterone . According to the sociologist Christie Davies , only around five percent of adults in Europe and North America are naturally blond. A study conducted in 2003 concluded that only four percent of American adults are naturally blond. A significant number of Caucasian women who have blonde hair have dyed it that way. The pigmentation of both hair and eyes
3630-482: Is the most-quoted female writer. Collectively, the Bible is the most-quoted work (in many translations); the most-quoted single work is Cursor Mundi . Additional material for a given letter range continued to be gathered after the corresponding fascicle was printed, with a view towards inclusion in a supplement or revised edition. A one-volume supplement of such material was published in 1933, with entries weighted towards
3751-531: Is the principal historical dictionary of the English language , published by Oxford University Press (OUP), a University of Oxford publishing house. The dictionary, which published its first edition in 1884, traces the historical development of the English language, providing a comprehensive resource to scholars and academic researchers, and provides ongoing descriptions of English language usage in its variations around
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3872-533: Is unlikely that it will ever be printed. As a historical dictionary, the Oxford English Dictionary features entries in which the earliest ascertainable recorded sense of a word, whether current or obsolete, is presented first, and each additional sense is presented in historical order according to the date of its earliest ascertainable recorded use. Following each definition are several brief illustrating quotations presented in chronological order from
3993-595: The Aeneid of Virgil , Maurus Servius Honoratus noted that the respectable matron was only black haired, never blonde. In the same passage, he mentioned that Cato the Elder wrote that some matrons would sprinkle golden dust on their hair to make it reddish-color. Emperor Lucius Verus (r. 161–169 AD) was said to sprinkle gold-dust on his already "golden" blond hair to make it even blonder and brighter. From an ethnic point of view, Roman authors associated blond and red hair with
4114-516: The Aphrodite of Knidos , sculpted in the fourth century BC by Praxiteles , represented the goddess' hair using gold leaf and contributed to the popularity of the image of Aphrodite as a blonde goddess. Greek prostitutes frequently dyed their hair blond using saffron dyes or colored powders. Blond dye was highly expensive, took great effort to apply, and smelled repugnant, but none of these factors inhibited Greek prostitutes from dying their hair. As
4235-462: The Los Angeles Times . Time dubbed the book "a scholarly Everest ", and Richard Boston , writing for The Guardian , called it "one of the wonders of the world ". The supplements and their integration into the second edition were a great improvement to the OED as a whole, but it was recognized that most of the entries were still fundamentally unaltered from the first edition. Much of
4356-578: The Ancient North Eurasians . The earliest known individual with this allele is a Siberian fossil from Afontova Gora, in south-central Siberia. Reich has written that the derived SNP for blond hair entered continental Europe by way of a massive population migration from the Eurasian steppe, by a people who had substantial Ancient North Eurasian ancestry. Blond hair has been discovered in human burial sites in north-western China and Mongolia dating to
4477-707: The Gauls and the Germans : e.g., Virgil describes the hair of the Gauls as "golden" ( aurea caesaries ), Tacitus wrote that "the Germans have fierce blue eyes, red-blond hair ( rutilae comae ), huge (tall) frames"; in accordance with Ammianus , almost all the Gauls were "of tall stature, fair and ruddy". Celtic and Germanic peoples of the provinces , among the free subjects called peregrini , served in Rome's armies as auxilia , such as
4598-525: The Levant , with no Steppe ancestry. He also observed that blond hair was rare in the available samples for early Bronze Age Steppe groups, yet common in the later Bronze Age groups, which is inconsistent with the theory that Steppe populations spread the phenotype for blond hair. However, this is consistent with a phenotype turnover occurring within the Steppe pastoralists, leading to a shift towards blond hair becoming
4719-697: The Macedonian ruler Alexander the Great and members of the Macedonian Greek Ptolemaic dynasty of Hellenistic Egypt had blond hair, such as Arsinoe II and Berenice II . Additionally, the ancient Greek lyric poet Bacchylides wrote of "the blonde daughters of the Lacedaemonians " ( Spartans ), while also noting the golden hair of athletes at the Nemean Games . The most famous statue of Aphrodite,
4840-509: The Nobel Prize in Physics ). Also in 1933 the original fascicles of the entire dictionary were re-issued, bound into 12 volumes, under the title " The Oxford English Dictionary ". This edition of 13 volumes including the supplement was subsequently reprinted in 1961 and 1970. In 1933, Oxford had finally put the dictionary to rest; all work ended, and the quotation slips went into storage. However,
4961-673: The Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology Jon Røyne Kyllingstad has written that in the early twentieth-century racialist and supremacist thinkers promulgated the theory that human features such as blond hair and blue eyes were hallmarks of a " master race ". In the 1920s, the eugenicist Eugen Fischer invented a hair palette called the Fischer scale that he said could categorize racial typology—these typologies were abandoned after World War II . Kyllingstad sees classification of race based on physical characteristics such as hair color as
Blonde (disambiguation) - Misplaced Pages Continue
5082-551: The OED is neither the world's largest nor the earliest exhaustive dictionary of a language. Another earlier large dictionary is the Grimm brothers ' dictionary of the German language , begun in 1838 and completed in 1961. The first edition of the Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca is the first great dictionary devoted to a modern European language (Italian) and was published in 1612;
5203-641: The OED2 adopted the modern International Phonetic Alphabet . Unlike the earlier edition, all foreign alphabets except Greek were transliterated . Following page 832 of Volume XX Wave -— Zyxt there's a 143-page separately paginated bibliography, a conflation of the OED 1st edition's published with the 1933 Supplement and that in Volume IV of the Supplement published in 1986. The British quiz show Countdown awarded
5324-399: The OED2 is mostly just a reorganization of the earlier corpus, but the retypesetting provided an opportunity for two long-needed format changes. The headword of each entry was no longer capitalized, allowing the user to readily see those words that actually require a capital letter. Murray had devised his own notation for pronunciation, there being no standard available at the time, whereas
5445-636: The OED2, was published. The first edition retronymically became the OED1 . The Oxford English Dictionary 2 was printed in 20 volumes. Up to a very late stage, all the volumes of the first edition were started on letter boundaries. For the second edition, there was no attempt to start them on letter boundaries, and they were made roughly equal in size. The 20 volumes started with A , B.B.C. , Cham , Creel , Dvandva , Follow , Hat , Interval , Look , Moul , Ow , Poise , Quemadero , Rob , Ser , Soot , Su , Thru , Unemancipated , and Wave . The content of
5566-443: The Oxford English Dictionary contained approximately 301,100 main entries. Supplementing the entry headwords , there are 157,000 bold-type combinations and derivatives; 169,000 italicized-bold phrases and combinations; 616,500 word-forms in total, including 137,000 pronunciations ; 249,300 etymologies ; 577,000 cross-references; and 2,412,400 usage quotations . The dictionary's latest, complete print edition (second edition, 1989)
5687-677: The Solomon Islands , Vanuatu , and Fiji ; among the Berbers of North Africa ; and among some Asian people. In Western culture , blonde hair has long been associated with beauty and vitality. Aphrodite , the ancient Greek goddess of love and beauty, was described as having blonde hair. In the Greco-Roman world , blonde hair was frequently associated with prostitutes, who dyed their hair using saffron dyes in order to attract more customers. The Greeks stereotyped Thracians and slaves as blond and
5808-542: The World Wide Web and new computer technology in general meant that the processes of researching the dictionary and of publishing new and revised entries could be vastly improved. New text search databases offered vastly more material for the editors of the dictionary to work with, and with publication on the Web as a possibility, the editors could publish revised entries much more quickly and easily than ever before. A new approach
5929-510: The 1998 book The Surgeon of Crowthorne (US title: The Professor and the Madman ), which was the basis for a 2019 film, The Professor and the Madman , starring Mel Gibson and Sean Penn . During the 1870s, the Philological Society was concerned with the process of publishing a dictionary with such an immense scope. They had pages printed by publishers, but no publication agreement
6050-565: The 2nd millennium CE. The Tuvans are a Turkic ethnic group with an occasional occurrence of blond hair with freckles, blue-green eyes. Most people in ancient Greece had dark hair and, as a result of this, the Greeks found blond hair immensely fascinating. In the Homeric epics, Menelaus the king of the Spartans is, together with some other Achaean leaders, portrayed as blond. Other blond characters in
6171-543: The Celtic-origin legendary heroine, were both significantly portrayed as blonde. In contemporary Western culture, blonde women are often stereotyped as beautiful, but unintelligent. The word blond is first documented in English in 1481 and derives from Old French blund , blont , meaning 'a colour midway between golden and light chestnut '. It gradually eclipsed the native term fair , of same meaning, from Old English fæġer , causing fair later to become
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#17330853820556292-427: The English language continued to change and, by the time 20 years had passed, the dictionary was outdated. There were three possible ways to update it. The cheapest would have been to leave the existing work alone and simply compile a new supplement of perhaps one or two volumes, but then anyone looking for a word or sense and unsure of its age would have to look in three different places. The most convenient choice for
6413-501: The European race", in a citation from 1833 Penny cyclopedia , which distinguishes genuine blondness as a Caucasian feature distinct from albinism . By the early 1990s, blonde moment or being a dumb blonde had come into common parlance to mean "an instance of a person, esp. a woman... being foolish or scatter-brained." Another hair color word of French origin, brunette (from the same Germanic root that gave brown ), functions in
6534-496: The Homeric poems are Peleus , Achilles , Meleager , Agamede , and Rhadamanthys . Aphrodite , the Greek goddess of love and beauty, was often described as golden-haired and portrayed with this color hair in art. Aphrodite's master epithet in the Homeric epics is χρυσέη ( khruséē ), which means "golden". The traces of hair color on Greek korai probably reflect the colors the artists saw in natural hair; these colors include
6655-514: The Iron Age. The Hmong people , originally from northern China, were historically recorded as having blonde hair and blue eyes by the Chinese in ancient times, but their features became darker as they migrated out of China and in to Southeast Asia. The ethnic Miao people of Guizhou province from China, a subgroup of Hmong people, have been described as having blue eyes and blonde hair. F.M Savina of
6776-515: The Materials Collected by The Philological Society ; the 352-page volume, words from A to Ant , cost 12 s 6 d (equivalent to $ 82 in 2023). The total sales were only 4,000 copies. The OUP saw that it would take too long to complete the work with unrevised editorial arrangements. Accordingly, new assistants were hired and two new demands were made on Murray. The first was that he move from Mill Hill to Oxford to work full-time on
6897-514: The OUP forced the promotion of Murray's assistant Henry Bradley (hired by Murray in 1884), who worked independently in the British Museum in London beginning in 1888. In 1896, Bradley moved to Oxford University. Gell continued harassing Murray and Bradley with his business concerns – containing costs and speeding production – to the point where the project's collapse seemed likely. Newspapers reported
7018-565: The Paris Foreign missionary society wrote that the Miao are "pale yellow in complexion, almost white, their hair is often light or dark brown, sometimes even red or corn-silk blond, and a few even have pale blue eyes." Chinese historical documents describe blond haired, blue-eyed warriors among the Xiongnu , a nomadic equestrian culture from Mongolia, who practiced Tengriism . The Shiwei people were
7139-669: The Romans associated blondness with the Celts and the Germanic peoples to the north. In the ancient Greek world, Iliad presented the mythological hero Achilles as what was then the ideal male warrior: handsome, tall, strong, and blond. In Western Europe during the Middle Ages , long and blonde hair was idealized as the paragon of female beauty. Sif , the wife of Thor in Norse mythology , and Iseult ,
7260-730: The United States, more than 120 typists of the International Computaprint Corporation (now Reed Tech ) started keying in over 350,000,000 characters, their work checked by 55 proof-readers in England. Retyping the text alone was not sufficient; all the information represented by the complex typography of the original dictionary had to be retained, which was done by marking up the content in SGML . A specialized search engine and display software were also needed to access it. Under
7381-537: The alphabet as before and updating "key English words from across the alphabet, along with the other words which make up the alphabetical cluster surrounding them". With the relaunch of the OED Online website in December 2010, alphabetical revision was abandoned altogether. The revision is expected roughly to double the dictionary in size. Apart from general updates to include information on new words and other changes in
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#17330853820557502-514: The blond man Jarl is considered to be the ancestor of the dominant warrior class. The Scandinavians were not the only ones to place strong emphasis on the beauty of blond hair; the French writer Christine de Pisan writes in her book The Treasure of the City of Ladies (1404) that "there is nothing in the world lovelier on a woman's head than beautiful blond hair". In medieval artwork, female saints are often shown with long, shimmering blond hair, which emphasizes their holiness and virginity. At
7623-460: The cavalry contingents in the army of Julius Caesar . Some became Roman citizens as far back as the 1st century BC, following a policy of Romanization of Gaul and Lesser Germania . Sometimes entire Celtic and Germanic tribes were granted citizenship, such as when emperor Otho granted citizenship to all of the Lingones in 69 AD. By the 1st century BC, the Roman Republic had expanded its control into parts of western Germany , and by 85 AD
7744-491: The character of gentlewomen, causing the overthrow of houses, the ruin of nuptials, and accusations on the part of children?" During the early years of the Roman Empire , blond hair was associated with prostitutes . The preference changed to bleaching the hair blond when Greek culture, which practiced bleaching, reached Rome, and was reinforced when the legions that conquered Gaul returned with blond slaves. Sherrow also states that Roman women tried to lighten their hair, but
7865-404: The colour syntax-directed editor for the project, LEXX , was written by Mike Cowlishaw of IBM. The University of Waterloo , in Canada, volunteered to design the database. A. Walton Litz , an English professor at Princeton University who served on the Oxford University Press advisory council, was quoted in Time as saying "I've never been associated with a project, I've never even heard of
7986-401: The complete dictionary to 16 volumes, or 17 counting the first supplement. Burchfield emphasized the inclusion of modern-day language and, through the supplement, the dictionary was expanded to include a wealth of new words from the burgeoning fields of science and technology, as well as popular culture and colloquial speech. Burchfield said that he broadened the scope to include developments of
8107-415: The covers of the series, and in 1928 the full dictionary was republished in 10 bound volumes. In 1933, the title The Oxford English Dictionary fully replaced the former name in all occurrences in its reprinting as 12 volumes with a one-volume supplement. More supplements came over the years until 1989, when the second edition was published, comprising 21,728 pages in 20 volumes. Since 2000, compilation of
8228-410: The derived blond hair allele to Europe, and that the "massive spread" of Yamnaya steppe pastoralists likely caused the "rapid selective sweep in European populations toward light skin and hair." In contrast, geneticist Iosif Lazaridis questioned whether or not blond hair could have originated from the migration of Steppe peoples. He found evidence for blond individuals in ancient Southern Europe and
8349-441: The dictionary in Chicago, where he was a professor. The fourth editor was Charles Talbut Onions , who compiled the remaining ranges starting in 1914: Su–Sz , Wh–Wo , and X–Z . In 1919–1920, J. R. R. Tolkien was employed by the OED , researching etymologies of the Waggle to Warlock range; later he parodied the principal editors as "The Four Wise Clerks of Oxenford" in the story Farmer Giles of Ham . By early 1894,
8470-459: The dictionary. In 1878, Oxford University Press agreed with Murray to proceed with the massive project; the agreement was formalized the following year. 20 years after its conception, the dictionary project finally had a publisher. It would take another 50 years to complete. Late in his editorship, Murray learned that one especially prolific reader, W. C. Minor , was confined to a mental hospital for (in modern terminology) schizophrenia . Minor
8591-462: The earliest ascertainable use of the word in that sense to the last ascertainable use for an obsolete sense, to indicate both its life span and the time since its desuetude, or to a relatively recent use for current ones. The format of the OED ' s entries has influenced numerous other historical lexicography projects. The forerunners to the OED , such as the early volumes of the Deutsches Wörterbuch , had initially provided few quotations from
8712-827: The fashion and modelling industries, or because they may be perceived as healthier or more fertile than blonde women. In Central Asia and East Asia , blonde women are ranked below black-haired women in the hierarchy of female attractiveness. In the Soviet Union , Russian schoolteachers struggled to convince Central Asian students that blue-eyed, blonde heroines in Russian poetry were attractive. The ethnic Kyrgyz students, in particular, regarded blonde women as "hideous", and insisted that their hair be changed to black. Popular television commercials in Japan have portrayed blonde women as highly jealous of black-haired Japanese women. In 2014,
8833-514: The few adjectives in written English to retain separate lexical genders. The two forms, however, are pronounced identically. American Heritage 's Book of English Usage propounds that, as "a blonde" (just so, with "blonde" as noun) might not uncommonly be used to describe a woman, but less often "a blond" used to describe a man, the term is an example of a " sexist stereotype [whereby] women are primarily defined by their physical characteristics." The Oxford English Dictionary ( OED ) records that
8954-421: The finished dictionary; Bradley died in 1923, having completed E–G , L–M , S–Sh , St , and W–We . By then, two additional editors had been promoted from assistant work to independent work, continuing without much trouble. William Craigie started in 1901 and was responsible for N , Q–R , Si–Sq , U–V , and Wo–Wy. The OUP had previously thought London too far from Oxford but, after 1925, Craigie worked on
9075-650: The first edition of Dictionnaire de l'Académie française dates from 1694. The official dictionary of Spanish is the Diccionario de la lengua española (produced, edited, and published by the Royal Spanish Academy ), and its first edition was published in 1780. The Kangxi Dictionary of Chinese was published in 1716. The largest dictionary by number of pages is believed to be the Dutch Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal . The dictionary began as
9196-673: The following year under the administrative direction of Timothy J. Benbow, with John A. Simpson and Edmund S. C. Weiner as co-editors. In 2016, Simpson published his memoir chronicling his years at the OED: The Word Detective: Searching for the Meaning of It All at the Oxford English Dictionary – A Memoir (New York: Basic Books). Thus began the New Oxford English Dictionary (NOED) project. In
9317-414: The following: Artificially blond hair may be called bleached blond , bottle blond , or peroxide blond . A typical explanation found in the scientific literature for the adaptation of light hair is related to the adaptation of light skin , and in turn the requirement for vitamin D synthesis and northern Europe's seasonally reduced solar radiation. Ancient DNA analysis (ADNA) has revealed that
9438-547: The group published the first sample pages; later that month, Coleridge died of tuberculosis , aged 30. Thereupon Furnivall became editor; he was enthusiastic and knowledgeable, but temperamentally ill-suited for the work. Many volunteer readers eventually lost interest in the project, as Furnivall failed to keep them motivated. Furthermore, many of the slips were misplaced. Furnivall believed that, since many printed texts from earlier centuries were not readily available, it would be impossible for volunteers to efficiently locate
9559-522: The harassment, particularly the Saturday Review , and public opinion backed the editors. Gell was fired, and the university reversed his cost policies. If the editors felt that the dictionary would have to grow larger, it would; it was an important work, and worth the time and money to properly finish. Neither Murray nor Bradley lived to see it. Murray died in 1915, having been responsible for words starting with A–D , H–K , O–P , and T , nearly half
9680-546: The hundreds of millions of copies of this SNP , the classic European blond hair mutation, entered continental Europe by way of a massive population migration from the Eurasian steppe, by a people who had substantial Ancient North Eurasian ancestry. Ancient North Eurasian admixture is present in mesolithic fossils from Northern Europe , and is linked to the prediction of blond hair in stone-age Scandinavians by ancient DNA analysis . Gavin Evans analyzed several years of research on
9801-680: The inauguration in June 2005 of the "Perfect All-Singing All-Dancing Editorial and Notation Application ", or "Pasadena". With this XML -based system, lexicographers can spend less effort on presentation issues such as the numbering of definitions. This system has also simplified the use of the quotations database, and enabled staff in New York to work directly on the dictionary in the same way as their Oxford-based counterparts. Other important computer uses include internet searches for evidence of current usage and email submissions of quotations by readers and
9922-422: The information in the dictionary published in 1989 was already decades out of date, though the supplements had made good progress towards incorporating new vocabulary. Yet many definitions contained disproven scientific theories, outdated historical information, and moral values that were no longer widely accepted. Furthermore, the supplements had failed to recognize many words in the existing volumes as obsolete by
10043-526: The intention of producing a third edition from them. The previous supplements appeared in alphabetical instalments, whereas the new series had a full A–Z range of entries within each individual volume, with a complete alphabetical index at the end of all words revised so far, each listed with the volume number which contained the revised entry. However, in the end only three Additions volumes were published this way, two in 1993 and one in 1997, each containing about 3,000 new definitions. The possibilities of
10164-436: The key role in the project's first months, but his appointment as Dean of Westminster meant that he could not give the dictionary project the time that it required. He withdrew and Herbert Coleridge became the first editor. On 12 May 1860, Coleridge's dictionary plan was published and research was started. His house was the first editorial office. He arrayed 100,000 quotation slips in a 54 pigeon-hole grid. In April 1861,
10285-635: The language in English-speaking regions beyond the United Kingdom , including North America, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India, Pakistan, and the Caribbean. Burchfield also removed, for unknown reasons, many entries that had been added to the 1933 supplement. In 2012, an analysis by lexicographer Sarah Ogilvie revealed that many of these entries were in fact foreign loanwords, despite Burchfield's claim that he included more such words. The proportion
10406-488: The language, the third edition brings many other improvements, including changes in formatting and stylistic conventions for easier reading and computerized searching, more etymological information, and a general change of focus away from individual words towards more general coverage of the language as a whole. While the original text drew its quotations mainly from literary sources such as novels, plays, and poetry, with additional material from newspapers and academic journals,
10527-419: The leather-bound complete version to the champions of each series between its inception in 1982 and Series 63 in 2010. The prize was axed after Series 83, completed in June 2021, due to being considered out of date. When the print version of the second edition was published in 1989, the response was enthusiastic. Author Anthony Burgess declared it "the greatest publishing event of the century", as quoted by
10648-590: The length and color of a woman's hair, considering long, blond hair to be the ideal, as it was associated with gold . In Norse mythology , the goddess Sif has famously blond hair. In the Old Norse Gunnlaug Saga , Helga the Beautiful , described as "the most beautiful woman in the world", is said to have had blond hair so long that it can "envelope her entirely". In the Poetic Edda poem Rígsþula ,
10769-487: The letter M , with new material appearing every three months on the OED Online website. The editors chose to start the revision project from the middle of the dictionary in order that the overall quality of entries be made more even, since the later entries in the OED1 generally tended to be better than the earlier ones. However, in March 2008, the editors announced that they would alternate each quarter between moving forward in
10890-644: The modern era. The Goths , a Germanic tribe who played a central role in the Fall of the Western Roman Empire through their conquest, were always described in ancient sources as tall and athletic, with light skin, yellow (blond) hair and blue eyes, The contemporary Greek scholar and historian Procopius noted of the Goths: "they all have white bodies and fair hair, and are tall and handsome to look upon." Medieval Scandinavian art and literature often places emphasis on
11011-488: The new edition will reference more kinds of material that were unavailable to the editors of previous editions, such as wills, inventories, account books, diaries, journals, and letters. John Simpson was the first chief editor of the OED3 . He retired in 2013 and was replaced by Michael Proffitt , who is the eighth chief editor of the dictionary. The production of the new edition exploits computer technology, particularly since
11132-529: The oldest fossil known to carry the mutated allele rs12821256 of the KITLG gene, which is responsible for blond hair in modern Europeans, is a 17,000 year old Ancient North Eurasian specimen from Afontova Gora in Southern Siberia . The precise genetic origin and spread of blond hair into its present-day distribution is a topic of debate amongst population geneticists . Geneticist David Reich said that
11253-443: The origin of European blond hair, and concluded that the widespread presence of blond hair in Europe is largely due to the territorial expansions of the "all-conquering" Western Steppe Herders ; who carried the genes for blond hair. A review article published in 2020 analyzes fossil data from a wide variety of published sources. The authors affirm the previous statements, noting that Ancient North Eurasian -derived populations carried
11374-434: The outer covers of the fascicles; the original title was still the official one and was used everywhere else. The 125th and last fascicle covered words from Wise to the end of W and was published on 19 April 1928, and the full dictionary in bound volumes followed immediately. William Shakespeare is the most-quoted writer in the completed dictionary, with Hamlet his most-quoted work. George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans)
11495-461: The phrase "big blond beast" was used in the 20th-century to refer specifically to men "of the Nordic type" (that is to say, blond-haired). The OED also records that that this term for fair hair as an adjective is especially used with reference to women, in which case it is likely to be spelt blonde , citing three Victorian usages of the term. The masculine version is used in the plural, in "blonds of
11616-699: The project in ten years. Murray started the project, working in a corrugated iron outbuilding called the " Scriptorium " which was lined with wooden planks, bookshelves, and 1,029 pigeon-holes for the quotation slips. He tracked and regathered Furnivall's collection of quotation slips, which were found to concentrate on rare, interesting words rather than common usages. For instance, there were ten times as many quotations for abusion as for abuse . He appealed, through newspapers distributed to bookshops and libraries, for readers who would report "as many quotations as you can for ordinary words" and for words that were "rare, obsolete, old-fashioned, new, peculiar or used in
11737-472: The project, which he did in 1885. Murray had his Scriptorium re-erected in the back garden of his new property. Murray resisted the second demand: that if he could not meet schedule, he must hire a second, senior editor to work in parallel to him, outside his supervision, on words from elsewhere in the alphabet. Murray did not want to share the work, feeling that he would accelerate his work pace with experience. That turned out not to be so, and Philip Gell of
11858-400: The provinces of Germania Inferior and Germania Superior were formally established there. Yet as late as the 4th century AD, Ausonius , a poet and tutor from Burdigala , wrote a poem about an Alemanni slave girl named Bissula , whom he had recently freed after she'd been taken as a prisoner of war in the campaigns of Valentinian I , noting that her adopted Latin language marked her as
11979-633: The quotations that the dictionary needed. As a result, he founded the Early English Text Society in 1864 and the Chaucer Society in 1868 to publish old manuscripts. Furnivall's preparatory efforts lasted 21 years and provided numerous texts for the use and enjoyment of the general public, as well as crucial sources for lexicographers, but they did not actually involve compiling a dictionary. Furnivall recruited more than 800 volunteers to read these texts and record quotations. While enthusiastic,
12100-475: The same time, however, Eve is sometimes shown with long, blond hair, which frames her nude body and draws attention to her sexual attractiveness. Iseult was so closely associated with blondness that, in the poems of Chrétien de Troyes , she is called "Iseult le Blonde". In Geoffrey Chaucer 's Canterbury Tales , the knight describes the Princess Emily as blond in his tale . In the older versions of
12221-548: The same way in orthodox English. The OED gives brunet as meaning 'dark-complexioned' or a 'dark-complexioned person', citing a comparative usage of brunet and blond to Thomas Henry Huxley in saying, "The present contrast of blonds and brunets existed among them." Brunette can be used, however, like blonde , to describe a mixed-gender populace. The OED quotes Grant Allen , "The nation which resulted... being sometimes blonde, sometimes brunette." Blond and blonde are also occasionally used to refer to objects that have
12342-399: The second supplement; Charles Talbut Onions turned 84 that year but was still able to make some contributions as well. The work on the supplement was expected to take about seven years. It actually took 29 years, by which time the new supplement (OEDS) had grown to four volumes, starting with A , H , O , and Sea . They were published in 1972, 1976, 1982, and 1986 respectively, bringing
12463-526: The start of the alphabet where the fascicles were decades old. The supplement included at least one word ( bondmaid ) accidentally omitted when its slips were misplaced; many words and senses newly coined (famously appendicitis , coined in 1886 and missing from the 1885 fascicle, which came to prominence when Edward VII 's 1902 appendicitis postponed his coronation ); and some previously excluded as too obscure (notoriously radium , omitted in 1903, months before its discoverers Pierre and Marie Curie won
12584-429: The story of Tristan and Iseult , Tristan falls in love with Iseult after seeing only a single lock of her long, blond hair. In fact, Iseult was so closely associated with blondness that, in the poems of Chrétien de Troyes , she is called "Iseult le Blonde". In Geoffrey Chaucer 's Canterbury Tales (written from 1387 until 1400), the knight describes the beautiful Princess Emily in his tale , stating, "yclothed
12705-508: The substances often caused hair loss, so they resorted to wigs made from the captives' hair. According to Francis Owen , Roman literary records describe a large number of well-known Roman historical personalities as blond. Juvenal wrote in a satirical poem that Messalina , Roman empress of noble birth, would hide her black hair with a blond wig for her nightly visits to the brothel: sed nigrum flavo crinem abscondente galero intravit calidum veteri centone lupanar . In his Commentary on
12826-494: The time of the second edition's publication, meaning that thousands of words were marked as current despite no recent evidence of their use. Accordingly, it was recognized that work on a third edition would have to begin to rectify these problems. The first attempt to produce a new edition came with the Oxford English Dictionary Additions Series, a new set of supplements to complement the OED2 with
12947-422: The user would have been for the entire dictionary to be re-edited and retypeset , with each change included in its proper alphabetical place; but this would have been the most expensive option, with perhaps 15 volumes required to be produced. The OUP chose a middle approach: combining the new material with the existing supplement to form a larger replacement supplement. Robert Burchfield was hired in 1957 to edit
13068-466: The volunteers were not well trained and often made inconsistent and arbitrary selections. Ultimately, Furnivall handed over nearly two tons of quotation slips and other materials to his successor. In the 1870s, Furnivall unsuccessfully attempted to recruit both Henry Sweet and Henry Nicol to succeed him. He then approached James Murray , who accepted the post of editor. In the late 1870s, Furnivall and Murray met with several publishers about publishing
13189-423: The world. In 1857, work first began on the dictionary, though the first edition was not published In until 1884. It began to be published in unbound fascicles as work continued on the project, under the name of A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles; Founded Mainly on the Materials Collected by The Philological Society . In 1895, the title The Oxford English Dictionary was first used unofficially on
13310-571: Was 0.5%. With the exception of Benevento and the surrounding area in Campania , where various shades of blond hair were present in 10–15% of the population, Southern Italy as a whole averaged between 2.5% and 7.4%. A number of blond naturally mummified bodies of common people (i.e. not proper mummies) dating to Roman times have been found in the Fagg El Gamous cemetery in Egypt . "Of those whose hair
13431-522: Was a Yale University-trained surgeon and a military officer in the American Civil War who had been confined to Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane after killing a man in London. He invented his own quotation-tracking system, allowing him to submit slips on specific words in response to editors' requests. The story of how Murray and Minor worked together to advance the OED was retold in
13552-419: Was called for, and for this reason it was decided to embark on a new, complete revision of the dictionary. Beginning with the launch of the first OED Online site in 2000, the editors of the dictionary began a major revision project to create a completely revised third edition of the dictionary ( OED3 ), expected to be completed in 2037 at a projected cost of about £ 34 million. Revisions were started at
13673-431: Was completed, it was clear that the full text of the dictionary would need to be computerized. Achieving this would require retyping it once, but thereafter it would always be accessible for computer searching—as well as for whatever new editions of the dictionary might be desired, starting with an integration of the supplementary volumes and the main text. Preparation for this process began in 1983, and editorial work started
13794-572: Was displayed inside the Parthenon . The Greeks thought of the Thracians who lived to the north as having reddish-blond hair. Because many Greek slaves were captured from Thrace , slaves were stereotyped as blond or red-headed. " Xanthias " (Ξανθίας), meaning "reddish blond", was a common name for slaves in ancient Greece and a slave by this name appears in many of the comedies of Aristophanes . Historian and Egyptologist Joann Fletcher asserts that
13915-409: Was estimated from a sample calculation to amount to 17% of the foreign loan words and words from regional forms of English. Some of these had only a single recorded usage, but many had multiple recorded citations, and it ran against what was thought to be the established OED editorial practice and a perception that he had opened up the dictionary to "World English". By the time the new supplement
14036-448: Was not a list of unregistered words; instead, it was the study On Some Deficiencies in our English Dictionaries , which identified seven distinct shortcomings in contemporary dictionaries: The society ultimately realized that the number of unlisted words would be far more than the number of words in the English dictionaries of the 19th century, and shifted their idea from covering only words that were not already in English dictionaries to
14157-512: Was preserved 54% were blondes or redheads, and the percentage grows to 87% when light-brown hair color is added." Excavations have been ongoing since the 1980s. Burials seem to be clustered by hair-colour. Blonde hair is also found in some other parts of the South Pacific, such as the Solomon Islands , Vanuatu , and Fiji , again with higher incidences in children. Blond hair in Melanesians
14278-479: Was printed in 20 volumes, comprising 291,500 entries in 21,730 pages. The longest entry in the OED2 was for the verb set , which required 60,000 words to describe some 580 senses (430 for the bare verb, the rest in phrasal verbs and idioms). As entries began to be revised for the OED3 in sequence starting from M, the record was progressively broken by the verbs make in 2000, then put in 2007, then run in 2011 with 645 senses. Despite its considerable size,
14399-580: Was reached; both the Cambridge University Press and the Oxford University Press were approached. The OUP finally agreed in 1879 (after two years of negotiating by Sweet, Furnivall, and Murray) to publish the dictionary and to pay Murray, who was both the editor and the Philological Society president. The dictionary was to be published as interval fascicles, with the final form in four volumes, totalling 6,400 pages. They hoped to finish
14520-416: Was she fressh, for to devyse:/Hir yellow heer was broided in a tresse/Behinde hir bak, a yerde long, I gesse" (lines 1048–1050). Because of blond hair's relative commonness in northern Europe, folk tales from these regions tend to feature large numbers of blond protagonists, although these stories may not have been seen by their original tellers as idealizing blond hair. Furthermore, it is noted that there
14641-547: Was to dye their hair blond or red. In 'Mark Twain and the American West', American novel writer Willa Cather 's depiction of Alexander the Great in ' Alexander's Bridge ' was described as "embodying the ideal", a "large, strong man with broad shoulders and rugged, blond good looks". In Nazi Germany , blond, stern-jawed men were seen as the masculine ideal as depicted in the films of Leni Riefenstahl and other propaganda. Writer R. Horrocks noted that totalitarianism reached
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