The title of my talk is taken from a book written by Elizabeth Murray and entitled Caught in the Web of Words, about her illustrious grandfather James Murray and the making of the Oxford English Dictionary. The "web of words" I should like to speak about now can be woven by the individual at home, in the office or elsewhere. It doesn't require the time and costly infrastructure of a large dictionary like the OED or the electronically driven British National Corpus, and, like living language, is dynamic, constantly changing and evolving. The virtual web, or corpus, is that of the World Wide Web, which abounds in books, articles, newspapers, magazines, journals and blogs, written and transcribed oral alike; the realized web is the one created by the individual using key-words with search tools such as Google.

I shall give two examples of English expressions, one international, the other Canadian.