Just ask OWLS

Since 1983, enquiries from members of the public have been answered by members of staff of the OED and other English dictionaries under the name of the Oxford Word and Language Service (OWLS), and since about 1996 this service has also had an e-mail address. When the AskOxford site was proposed, it was natural to think of making OWLS one of the resources available. However, the prospect of every websurfer sending e-mail queries to the OED was a daunting one, especially as the same questions are often asked over and over again. It was clear that, like any self-respecting information web site, OWLS would need an FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) page to provide answers to the most common enquiries. Many had already been covered by our little book, Questions of English (OUP 1994). Thinking of our new electronic readership, we rewrote some of these and added a few more.

The result is a useful general resource giving easily available answers to some of those perennially vexing questions: is it I or me, its or it's, pizzas or pizza's; what is the word for a group of cats, a baby hedgehog, the opposite of a misogynist; hungry, angry - do any other English words really end in -gry, what is the longest English word, and why don't we just introduce phonetic spelling?

However, there is one question which we are still waiting to answer: what is the most common question asked by users of the AskOxford web site? Watch this space!