For those with a love of words, there is plenty to rejoice—or despair—over as the English language continues to change at bewildering speed.

Just when everyone had mastered LOL, OMG and perhaps even yeet, along came rizz, delulu, situationship, brain rot and an ever-expanding vocabulary capable of making one generation incomprehensible to the next. And then, of course, there are still those tell-tale spelling differences between British and American English.

For professional etymologists, linguists, spelling-bee champions, those for whom the dictionary was a favourite reading source in youth, or simply wags who enjoy a little cryptic slang with their dignified attire, this dignifed, dictionary-hued tartan contains just the right amount of tartan humour/humor.

It was designed in honour of one of the rather less traditional entries to find its way into the Oxford English Dictionary: LOL, meaning “laughing out loud” or “laugh out loud.” Fortunately, at least this one is spelled the same way on both sides of the pond.

Its extended family has included ROFL (Rolling on the Floor Laughing), ROTFL, ROTFLMAO (look it up), lolz and lul—relics of an era when part of the fun was inventing increasingly clever acronyms and expecting everyone else to decipher them. These have gradually given way to the much more overt—and often over-the-top—language of emojis, where 😂, 🤣, 😭 or 💀 can dispense with words altogether. From cryptic abbreviation to pictograph, digital communication has, in a curious way, come full circle.

The Oxford English Dictionary itself began life in the mid-19th century as an extraordinarily ambitious Victorian project to record the English language through its history, tracing words through quotations showing how their meanings and uses had changed over time. The first fascicle appeared in 1884, and the final part of the original first edition was published in 1928—a monumental undertaking spanning more than 40 years.

A little earlier, Noah Webster (1758–1843), the American educator, author and lexicographer sometimes called the “Father of the American Dictionary,” published his American Dictionary of the English Language in 1828 after decades of work. Containing some 70,000 entries, it helped establish distinctly American spelling conventions such as color rather than colour and center rather than centre.

English remains notoriously troublesome to spell and pronounce, partly because its vocabulary has been accumulated from a remarkable assortment of languages—Old English, Old Norse, French, Latin, Greek and many others—while its spelling has preserved layers of that history with very little concern for the convenience of later generations.

Native speakers can therefore be grateful for having acquired much of this linguistic chaos before they were old enough to question it. And perhaps that is part of the fun of English: words are borrowed, invented, abbreviated, misspelled into respectability and occasionally replaced altogether by a tiny yellow face.

Somehow, the dictionaries keep up. This tartan gives them their due.

LOL. ❤️ 🖤 🤍 ❤️ 😆 🤣 😅 😄