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The Usage Panel is a group of nearly 200 prominent scholars, creative writers, journalists, diplomats, and others in occupations requiring mastery of language. Annual surveys have gauged the acceptability of particular usages and grammatical constructions.
2. NauticalEither of two lights, red to port, green to starboard, shown by ships at night.
3. A piece of incidental or contrasting information.
4. Usage ProblemAn additional activity; a sideline.
Usage Note: Sidelight is sometimes used to refer to an additional activity, no doubt by confusion with sideline. The Usage Panel does not cotton to this usage, with 77 percent rejecting it in our 2008 survey in He started his own trio in 1990. As a sidelight, he worked with Freddie Hubbard.
Thousands of entries in the dictionary include etymologies that trace their origins back to reconstructed proto-languages. You can obtain more information about these forms in our online appendices:
The Indo-European appendix covers nearly half of the Indo-European roots that have left their mark on English words. A more complete treatment of Indo-European roots and the English words derived from them is available in our Dictionary of Indo-European Roots.