Free dictionary

Where to start? The most obvious use of the OED is exploring a word’s past, so you might start by plugging in a term you’ve been wondering about — or complaining about. Trend, the verb, was at the tip of my tongue; the American Dialect Society recently named it 2010’s word Most Likely to Succeed, in its new special sense: “to exhibit a burst of online buzz.” I’ve heard objections to trend as a verb even in its older sense — “tend in a given direction” — but are those just random peeves?

The verb itself, says the OED, has a long and respectable past, as Middle English trenden, Old English trendan, and thence to Old Germanic. A thousand years ago the word meant “roll,” but by 1600 the sense had expanded; it was “to turn off in a specified direction,” as in a 1616 description of a British coastline: “The shore treandeth out more, and more.” By the 1860s, the figurative use was established: “In which direction do the sympathies and interests of the Border States actually trend?” So though Twitter’s “trending topics” may be trendy usage (and trendy itself is a mere 50 years old), trending itself is an old story.

But the old OED could have told you that. The new OED Online makes it easy to look for things you may not have known you wanted: Click “Browse” on the home page, and you’ll find options for rounding up all the words borrowed from Japanese ( anime, Betamax, honcho) or Arabic ( ghoul, henna, mufti), or words related to carriage-building ( barouche, phaeton, side-car), or those labeled derogatory ( pack rat, pap, relic, riffraff, runt).