At Notre Dame, the archives is on the sixth floor of Hesburgh Library. English speakers who once studied Latin think of agenda. But it belongs to that odd category of plural nouns that can take singular verbs.
#Shorter oxford english dictionary archive archive
However, definition number one adds “Now only in pl.” The 1971 edition of the unabridged Oxford English Dictionary begins its definition of archive with “Mostly in pl.”ĭictionaries from both Old World and New identify archives as a plural noun. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1973, first published in 1933) has the word archive but not archives. In the New World, we know better than to omit the “s.” And we would never use archive as a verb. The word archive does not appear in the dictionary I had to buy in high school, Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language (Cleveland and New York, 1964). Most modern dictionaries favor the more scientific descriptive approach, but hedge their bets with an occasional word of advice about correct usage. A descriptive dictionary tells us how people actually use them.
In my own training as an archivist I learned that the word, a noun, signifies a single document kept in an archives.Ī prescriptive dictionary tells us how we ought to use words. Old archivists cringe when they hear the word archive-or see it in print, or trip over it as they browse the internet. Movable stacks at the Hesburgh Library Annex
0 kommentar(er)
