In recent years Oxford University Press has made efforts to expand the Oxford English Dictionary by introducing vocabulary used by English speakers around the world. The Oxford Dictionary of African American English (ODAAE), however, may be the press’s most ambitious effort of this kind to date. Slated for release in 2025, the ODAAE will involve a three-year-long multidisciplinary research project compiling terms popularized by speakers of African American English (AAE), a variety of English blended with African languages and geographically distinct North American dialects.
While several dictionaries devoted to African American speech were published during the twentieth century—with editors such as singer Cab Calloway and poet Clarence Major—the ODAAE will be the first “large-scale, systematic study, based on historical principles,
