Oxford English Dictionary in the context of English language

The Western world, also known as the West, primarily refers to various nations and states in Western Europe, Northern America, and Australasia; with some debate as to whether those in Eastern Europe and Latin America also constitute the West. The Western world likewise is called the Occident (from Latin occidens 'setting down, sunset, west') in contrast to the Eastern world known as the Orient (from Latin oriens 'origin, sunrise, east'). Definitions of the "Western world" vary according to context and perspectives; the West is an evolving concept made up of cultural, political, and economic synergy among diverse groups of people, and not a rigid region with fixed borders and members.

Some historians contend that a linear development of the West can be traced from Ancient Greece and Rome, while others argue that such a projection constructs a false genealogy. A geographical concept of the West started to take shape in the 4th century CE when Constantine, the first Christian Roman emperor, divided the Roman Empire between the Greek East and Latin West. The East Roman Empire, later called the Byzantine Empire, continued for a millennium, while the West Roman Empire lasted for only about a century and a half. Significant theological and ecclesiastical differences led Western Europeans to consider the Christians in the Byzantine Empire as heretics. In 1054 CE, when the church in Rome excommunicated the patriarch of Byzantium, the politico-religious division between the Western church and Eastern church culminated in the Great Schism or the East–West Schism. Even though friendly relations continued between the two parts of Christendom for some time, the crusades made the schism definitive with hostility. The West during these crusades tried to capture trade routes to the East and failed, it instead discovered the Americas. In the aftermath of the European colonization of the Americas, primarily involving Western European powers, an idea of the "Western" world, as an inheritor of Latin Christendom emerged. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest reference to the term "Western world" was from 1586, found in the writings of William Warner.

British English is the set of varieties of the English language native to the United Kingdom, especially Great Britain. More narrowly, it can refer specifically to the English language in England, or, more broadly, to the collective dialects of English throughout the United Kingdom taken as a single umbrella variety, for instance additionally incorporating Scottish English, Welsh English, and Northern Irish English. Tom McArthur in the Oxford Guide to World English acknowledges that British English shares "all the ambiguities and tensions [with] the word 'British' and as a result can be used and interpreted in two ways, more broadly or more narrowly, within a range of blurring and ambiguity".

Variations exist in formal (both written and spoken) English in the United Kingdom. For example, the adjective wee is almost exclusively used in parts of Scotland, north-east England, Northern Ireland, Ireland, and occasionally Yorkshire, whereas the adjective little is predominant elsewhere. Nevertheless, there is a meaningful degree of uniformity in written English within the United Kingdom, and this could be described by the term British English. The forms of spoken English, however, vary considerably more than in most other areas of the world where English is spoken and so a uniform concept of British English is more difficult to apply to the spoken language.

Subsidiarity is a principle of social organization that holds that social and political issues should be dealt with at the most immediate or local level that is consistent with their resolution. The Oxford English Dictionary defines subsidiarity as "the principle that a central authority should have a subsidiary function, performing only those tasks which cannot be performed at a more local level". The concept is applicable in the fields of government, political science, neuropsychology, cybernetics, management and in military command (mission command). The OED adds that the term "subsidiarity" in English follows the early German usage of "Subsidiarität". More distantly, it is derived from the Latin verb subsidio (to aid or help), and the related noun subsidium (aid or assistance).

The development of the concept of subsidiarity has roots in the natural law philosophy of Thomas Aquinas and was mediated by the social scientific theories of Luigi Taparelli, SJ, in his 1840–43 natural law treatise on the human person in society. In that work, Taparelli established the criteria of just social order, which he referred to as "hypotactical right" and which came to be termed "subsidiarity" following German influences.

Rhythm (from Greek ῥυθμός, rhythmos, "any regular recurring motion, symmetry") generally means a "movement marked by the regulated succession of strong and weak elements, or of opposite or different conditions". This general meaning of regular recurrence or pattern in time can apply to a wide variety of cyclical natural phenomena having a periodicity or frequency of anything from microseconds to several seconds (as with the riff in a rock music song); to several minutes or hours, or, at the most extreme, even over many years.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines rhythm as "The measured flow of words or phrases in verse, forming various patterns of sound as determined by the relation of long and short or stressed and unstressed syllables in a metrical foot or line; an instance of this".

Harlequinade is an English comic theatrical genre, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as "that part of a pantomime in which the harlequin and clown play the principal parts". It developed in England between the 17th and mid-19th centuries. It was originally a slapstick adaptation or variant of the commedia dell'arte, which originated in Italy and reached its apogee there in the 16th and 17th centuries. The story of the Harlequinade revolves around a comic incident in the lives of its five main characters: Harlequin, who loves Columbine; Columbine's greedy and foolish father Pantaloon (evolved from the character Pantalone), who tries to separate the lovers in league with the mischievous Clown; and the servant, Pierrot, usually involving chaotic chase scenes with a bumbling policeman.

Originally a mime (silent) act with music and stylised dance, the harlequinade later employed some dialogue, but it remained primarily a visual spectacle. Early in its development, it achieved great popularity as the comic closing part of a longer evening of entertainment, following a more serious presentation with operatic and balletic elements. An often elaborate magical transformation scene, presided over by a fairy, connected the unrelated stories, changing the first part of the pantomime, and its characters, into the harlequinade. In the late 18th and 19th centuries, the harlequinade became the larger part of the entertainment, and the transformation scene was presented with increasingly spectacular stage effects. The harlequinade lost popularity towards the end of the 19th century and disappeared altogether in the 1930s, although Christmas pantomimes continue to be presented in Britain without the harlequinade.

A paramilitary is a force or unit that functions and is organized in a manner analogous to a military force, but does not have professional or legitimate status. The Oxford English Dictionary traces the use of the term "paramilitary" as far back as 1934.

An antiquarian or antiquary (from Latin antiquarius 'pertaining to ancient times') is an aficionado or student of antiquities or things of the past. More specifically, the term is used for those who study history with particular attention to ancient artefacts, archaeological and historic sites, or historic archives and manuscripts. The essence of antiquarianism is a focus on the empirical evidence of the past, and is perhaps best encapsulated in the motto adopted by the 18th-century antiquary Sir Richard Colt Hoare, "We speak from facts, not theory."

The Oxford English Dictionary first cites "archaeologist" from 1824; this soon took over as the usual term for one major branch of antiquarian activity. "Archaeology", from 1607 onwards, initially meant what is now seen as "ancient history" generally, with the narrower modern sense first seen in 1837.

The Concise Oxford English Dictionary (officially titled The Concise Oxford Dictionary until 2002, and widely abbreviated COD or COED) is one of the best-known of the 'smaller' Oxford dictionaries. The latest edition contains over 240,000 entries and 1,728 pages ("concise" compared to the OED at over 21,000 pages). Its 12th edition, published in 2011, is used by both the United Nations (UN) and NATO as the current authority for spellings in documents in English for international use. It is available as an e-book for a variety of handheld device platforms. In addition to providing information for general use, it documents local variations such as United States and United Kingdom usage.

It was started as a derivative of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), although section S–Z had to be written before the Oxford English Dictionary reached that stage. However, starting from the 10th edition, it is based on the Oxford Dictionary of English (ODE) rather than the OED. The most recent edition is the 12th, published in 2011.

Humility is the quality of being humble. The Oxford Dictionary, in its 1998 edition, describes humility as having a low opinion of oneself or not being prideful. More recent definitions of humility involve having an accurate opinion of oneself and expressing one-self's modesty as appropriate, with clear goal orientation, openness, broad-mindedness, and a non-imposing mentality. In a religious context, humility can mean a self-recognition of a deity (i.e. God) and subsequent submission to that deity as a religious member. Outside of a religious context, humility is defined as being "unselved"—liberated from the consciousness of self—a form of temperance that is neither having pride (or haughtiness) nor indulging in self-deprecation.

Humility may also refer to a proper sense of self-regard. Humility may be misinterpreted as the capacity to endure humiliation through self-denigration. This misconception arises from the confusion of humility with traits like submissiveness and meekness. Such misinterpretations prioritize self-preservation and self-aggrandizement over true humility, and emphasize an undiminished focus on the self.

Judicial murder is the intentional and premeditated killing of an innocent person by means of capital punishment; therefore, it is a subset of wrongful execution. The Oxford English Dictionary describes it as "death inflicted by process of law, capital punishment, esp. considered to be unjust or cruel". Judicial murder is not to be confused with judicial homicide, which also encompasses the lawful application of capital punishment following a legitimately procured conviction and sentence.

A satellite state or dependent state is a country that is formally independent but under heavy political, economic, and military influence or control from another country. The term was coined by analogy to planetary objects orbiting a larger object, such as smaller moons revolving around larger planets, and is used mainly to refer to Central and Eastern European member states of the Warsaw Pact during the Cold War, as well as to Mongolia and Tuva between 1924 and 1990, all of which were economically, culturally, and politically dominated by the Soviet Union. While primarily referring to the Soviet-controlled states in Central and Eastern Europe or Asia, in some contexts the term also refers to other countries under Soviet hegemony during the Cold War, such as North Korea (especially in the years surrounding the Korean War of 1950–1953), Cuba (particularly after it joined the Comecon in 1972), North Vietnam during the Vietnam War, and some countries in the American sphere of influence, such as South Vietnam during 1964–1973. In Western usage, the term has seldom been applied to states other than those in the Soviet orbit. In Soviet usage, the term applied to states in the orbit of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan, whereas in the West the term to refer to those has typically been client states.

The Oxford English Dictionary traces the concept of satellite states in English back as early as 1780. In times of war or political tension, satellite states sometimes served as buffers between an enemy country and the nation exerting control over the satellites.

A democratic republic is a form of government operating on principles adopted from a republic, ie: a representative democracy. As a cross between two similar systems, democratic republics may function on principles shared by both republics and direct democracies.

While not all democracies are republics (constitutional monarchies, for instance, are not) common definitions of the terms democracy and republic often feature overlapping concerns, suggesting that many democracies function as republics, and many republics operate on democratic principles, as shown by these definitions from the Oxford English Dictionary:

In philosophy, neutrality is the tendency to not take a side in a conflict (physical or ideological), which may not suggest neutral parties do not have a side or are not a side themselves. In colloquial use, neutral can be synonymous with unbiased. However, bias is a favoritism for one side, distinct from the tendency to act on that favoritism. Neutrality is distinct (though not exclusive) from apathy, ignorance, indifference, doublethink, equality, agreement, and objectivity. Apathy and indifference each imply a level of carelessness about a subject, though a person exhibiting neutrality may feel bias on a subject but choose not to act on it. A neutral person can also be well-informed on a subject and therefore need not be ignorant. Since they can be biased, a neutral person need not feature doublethink (i.e. accepting both sides as correct), equality (i.e. viewing both sides as equal), or agreement (a form of group decision-making; here it would require negotiating a solution on everyone's opinion, including one's own which may not be unbiased). Objectivity suggests siding with the more reasonable position (except journalistic objectivity), where reasonableness is judged by some common basis between the sides, such as logic (thereby avoiding the problem of incommensurability). Neutrality implies tolerance regardless of how disagreeable, deplorable, or unusual a perspective might be.

In moderation and mediation, neutrality is often expected to make judgments or facilitate dialogue independent of any bias, emphasizing on the process rather than the outcome. For example, a neutral party is seen as a party with no (or a fully disclosed) conflict of interest in a conflict, and is expected to operate as if it has no bias. Neutral parties are often perceived as more trustworthy, reliable, and safe. Alternative to acting without a bias, the bias of neutrality itself is the expectation upon the Swiss government (in armed neutrality), and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (in non-interventionism). The Oxford English Dictionary documents that, by at least 1897, "neutral" meant applying the rules to the facts, as in football "Neutral linesmen shall officiate in all games." In the Supreme Court decision Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System v. Southworth based on the United States Constitution's First Amendment, the court decided some funding decisions should be made through a neutral viewpoint.