Grammar Girl here. I'm in Yon Fogarty and today I'm here with Fiona McPherson, Senior Editor at the Oxford English Dictionary who works on New Words. She's been there since 1997.

Fiona, welcome to the Grammar Girl podcast. Thank you very much.

It's a pleasure to be here.

Yes.

So you're on today because the OED has, it is essentially overflowing with new words

about beer.

Yeah, there's a big beer update to the OED.

So my first question is, how does the OED come to having a beer update?

Like, were you all sitting around at Octoberfest last year and thought, hey, that'd be a good

idea? Like, how does that happen? Well, it is quite handy that Octoberfest has just happened.

I think people thinking about that probably. it made beer sort of foremost in our

minds. But of course, we work so far ahead, as you alluded to, that it's not, it's never that

spontaneous. And I think beer is one of those words. It's, it's a longstanding word. It goes back,

you know, really far, back to old English times. It's one of those staple words, I suppose. And as we're

revising the OED and adding new material as well, it was one of those big entries with a lot of

also associated words that just seemed good to turn our heads to and turn our editing skills to

this time. Yeah, I was surprised that, I mean, maybe I shouldn't be surprised because beer is,

as you said, very old. I mean, Samarians had a goddess of beer. Oh, and I looked this up. I was

really surprised. So beer is older than wine, apparently. So that was interesting. Yeah. I mean,

there you are. Yep, exactly. Note that down for your pub quizzes.

And I was surprised, you know, beer is mentioned in Beowulf, one of the oldest pieces of English literature we have.

Yeah, and I mean, you sort of said you were surprised and then you said, maybe I shouldn't be surprised.

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