The OED Assignment

Few freshmen have used their college library databases enough to appreciate the joys of the online Oxford English Dictionary. Every semester I assign a fun homework project in which each student has to pick one difficult word that they don't already know the definition for and look that up through the school's portal for the OED. The students share these words (with their definitions and year they were first seen in print) with the class. We write these words on the board and then try to construct one sentence using all of them.


It's a fun and quick class time activity that encourages the use of the library's databases, appreciation for English words and their history, group work, and sentence construction.


Here are the two sentences we constructed this semester. (The first class is much smaller than the second, so that sentence is shorter.)





After a mumpsimus absquatulated with my skinking selcouth phone, I pandiculated into a juxtaposition of taxonomy.





My Quixotic fere, through enlightened self-interest, maligned an insidious plethora of ostentatiousness requiring dastardly bacteriotherapy and a magirical unguent that prorepted into an interbation of lifelong jejunes which made him trepidatious of effrontery.