The Oxford Dictionary of African American English

Henry Louis Gates Jr., ed.

The Oxford Dictionary of African American English

Oxford

Oxford Univ. Press

Projected for 2025

Draft entries, with track changes, for Aunt Hagar’s children and cakewalk. 

Strange to say, but in the year 2024 there is still no comprehensive dictionary of one of the most distinctive and historically important varieties of English—that used in African American communities. (The pioneering Clarence Major focused only on slang.) The gap will soon be filled. In 2022 came the announcement of an in-progress Oxford Dictionary of African American English, overseen by Harvard’s Henry Louis Gates Jr. Lexicography remains a vital enterprise, and there are still urgent tasks to do, more than half a millennium after the earliest printed dictionaries. 

Courtesy of Harvard University Faculty of Arts and Sciences. HHD no. 132