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This paper examines the lexicon of Southeast Asian varieties of English and its representation in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). It begins by describing the OED's changing editorial policies with regard to words originating from outside of Britain. It then focusses on Southeast Asian words included in the OED's third and latest edition, and on recent efforts to improve the OED's handling of this type of vocabulary. The paper concludes with a discussion of the key issues that need to be addressed to ensure adequate treatment of Southeast Asian and other World Englishes in the OED: overcoming the shortage of written resources through targeted and collaborative research programmes, providing better regional labelling through the comparative study of the lexis of national and regional varieties, and diversifying the OED's coverage of Southeast Asian Englishes by including words and meanings of more current usage, as well as lexical innovations beyond simple borrowing.Keywords Oxford English Dictionary · Southeast Asian Englishes · World Englishes The OED and World EnglishesWidely regarded as the most authoritative and comprehensive dictionary of the English language, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) contains information on the meaning, history and pronunciation of over 600,000 English words, exemplified by Communicated by Yukio Tono.

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This article focuses on the cross-linguistic lexical influence between English and Spanish. We begin by redefining the concept of cross-linguistic lexical influence as the impact that two or more languages have on each other’s vocabulary. We then present a brief chronological survey of Hispanicisms in English and Anglicisms in Spanish, taking theOxford English Dictionary(OED) and theDiccionario de la lengua española(DRAE) as the main sources, and examine some of the factors that affect the patterns of word interchange between these two languages. We argue that the historical and social milieu, mass media, information technology, prevailing attitudes to foreignisms, and the stance taken by dictionaries and official linguistic policy condition which words are borrowed, affect the phonological, orthographic and semantic forms of these borrowings, and impact the degree of their integration in the receiving language. The present study is the first to offer a cross-linguistic (bilateral) perspective on lexical borrowing, a novel approach that is of particular interest given the contrasting philosophical differences governing language policy and lexicographic traditions in English and Spanish. It demonstrates the importance of adopting a comparative approach in the study of lexical influence between languages.

One of the immediate consequences of cross-linguistic lexical influence in languages that have an explicit gender system is the need to assign a gender to newly borrowed terms. In this paper, we analyze gender assignment in two recent technology-related borrowings in Spanish, 'tablet' and 'selfie', paying particular attention to the morphological, phonological and semantic factors that play a role in this process. We explain how these two words have been adopted and adapted by the Spanish language, and how various language institutions have attempted to establish policies to control or limit their use. In so doing, we demonstrate that sociolinguistic factors, such as the attitudes of Spanish language institutions vis-à-vis lexical borrowings from English, can contribute to understanding the phenomenon of the assignment of gender to Anglicisms in Spanish and their integration in the language.