Words in War-Time Project

The Words in War-Time Project provides a detailed exploration of Andrew Clark’s collection of notebooks and folders on the subject of “English Words in War-Time,” assembled 1914–1919, and archived in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Clark’s wide-ranging documentation—with annotations, definitions, frequency statements, and citational evidence of lexical/semantic change during World War I, along with frequent comparisons to the Oxford English Dictionary—has, as part of the project, been transferred to a tagged and fully searchable database, enabling, as this essay examines, new insights into Clark’s interdisciplinary focus, his status as lexicographer, and the shifting patterns of language and lexical history in a period of critical change.