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Introduction

New! A site devoted to the heavily revised new edition of my book The F-Word.

This is my personal site, and the opinions expressed are my own. Although what I write may be informed by my professional life as the Oxford English Dictionary's Editor at Large (North America), the content is neither endorsed by nor associated with the OED. Please click the links at the top of this page for whatever you're looking for.

Site info

I used to be an editor in the Reference Department at Random House, and from 1996 to the time I left in 1999 I wrote a language column called "Jesse's Word of the Day," which was based at this current Web address (i.e. jessesword.com). A book based on these columns also referred to this address in its title. After I left Random House, the column was retitled "Mavens' Word of the Day," with entries written by other editors.

Those columns remain the property of Random House, and I do not have the right to put them up on this site. The Random House Reference Department was disbanded in November 2001, and the archive of the Word of the Day site was, until recently (mid-2007), still being supported. However that archive is now down. If you are looking for the column, you can still find it in The Internet Archive. Unsigned entries before October 1999 were written by me; signed entries after that date were written by the named editor.