About the author: Lynne Murphy is Reader in Linguistics at the University of Sussex. She has published widely on lexical semantics and lexicology, including the monograph Semantic relations and the lexicon: antonymy, synonymy, and other paradigms and the textbook Lexical Meaning, both for Cambridge University Press. Her research focuses on various aspects of word meaning, and she is particularly interested in the differences between British and American English. She is the author of the blog Separated by a Common Language, and tweets as @lynneguist.

About the author: Philip Durkin is the Deputy Chief Editor and Principal Etymologist of the Oxford English Dictionary. His research on English etymology explores language contact and the nature of English lexis. He has published widely, in both the popular press and academic journals including Transactions of the Philological Society, Dictionaries, and Critical Quarterly. He has also written two monographs for Oxford University Press: The Oxford Guide to Etymology in 2009, and Borrowed Words: A History of Loanwords in English in 2014.