Describing the decade : Oxford Dictionaries Online


World of words Describing the decade toggle The story of dictionaries The Oxford English Corpus Composition and structure Facts about the language Using the Corpus The Corpus and the dictionary entry Technical information Using the Corpus in your research Corpus demonstrations toggle Words, words, words The history of English Tweet's leap from nature to the Net Describing the decade Useful Links toggle Frequently asked questions Questions about dictionaries Questions about language Vocabulary questions Questions about symbols Word origins Random questions		Home › World of words › Words, words, words › Describing the decade Describing the decade Describing the decade: anxious aughts or naughty noughties? Maybe we should simply accept that we are living in a decade that may someday be known as the Anxious Aughts. USA Today News (2003) Maybe the naughty noughties won't be such a cultureless decade after all. Sunday Herald (2000) On 31 December 2009 we said farewell to the first decade of the 21^st century. It was an eventful 10 years in many respects, not least in terms of language change: English was enriched by thousands of new words or meanings, from podcast to sudoku, and even the debate about what to call the decade generated some inventive coinages. Here’s an interactive graph showing the relative fortunes of three of the main contenders for the name of the decade 2000 to 2009 – aughts, naughties, and noughties. It’s based on the frequency with which the words appeared in our language database, from January 2000 to early 2010. Click on the points in the graph to see an example of the word being used in that month. Click on the coloured square for each word to highlight a word trend on the graph. Clearly, noughties was the out-and-out winner, rising sharply in 2009 and peaking in early 2010 to a frequency of almost 1.2 instances per million words in the Oxford English Corpus (Oxford’s 2-billion word database of real English, taken from writing as varied as newspapers, scientific journals, novels, and blogs). There’s more about the word here. Noughties comes from nought, the British word for the digit 0: the American spelling is naught. Inevitably, the similarity in sound of noughties and naughties made naughties a punningly neat alternative spelling, blending naught with the adjective naughty to refer to the supposed moral tone of the decade and also making a link to the naughty nineties (the last decade of the 19^th century). Although the Oxford English Dictionary shows that naughties was the first recorded spelling (evidenced in a New York Times Magazine article of 1989), our graph shows that the take-up of naughties was very low, remaining at fewer than 0.2 occurrences per million words on our databases. While aughts fared slightly better, rising to a peak of almost 0.4 examples per million words, analysis shows that nearly all examples (76%) for aughts in the Oxford English Corpus are found in American English. British usage shows a clear preference for noughties (73% of the instances in the OEC), and it appears that this time the British version won out overall. As you can see, both aughts and noughties rose markedly in 2009 to early 2010, probably as commentators, journalists, bloggers, and others took a retrospective look at the decade as it came to a close. What next? Of course, the name for the current decade from 2010 to 2019 isn’t entirely settled yet: with the current global economic situation looking gloomy, are there any takers for the terrible tens or the troubled teens? What a relief when we get to 2020 onwards – surely no debate will be necessary and we will smoothly refer to the (twenty-) twenties, thirties, etc. – but language doesn’t always evolve in expected ways, which is part of what makes word-watching such a fascinating job.