9 May 2020
I want to comment on four types of dates you will find here on wordorigins.org: dates of first known use of word or phrase; dates of scholarship and proposed etymologies; the publication dates of the editions of the Oxford English Dictionary; and the dates of entries on this site’s Big List.
Dates of First Use
Regarding the first known use of a word or phrase—and this applies not only to this site but to any source that lists early uses of a term—most of the time the date given is not the date the term was first used. It’s just the earliest that the particular researcher or team of researchers has been able to identify. Most terms are first used in speech, and no record of those early uses exists. And given that most printed texts haven’t been digitized (what Google and others have done to date is only the tip of the iceberg), and those that have are often split up among various, unlinked, proprietary databases, one can expect that earlier uses, i.e., antedatings, will eventually be found. The first citations given by recent, well-researched sources should be pretty close in time to the term’s coinage, but they’re probably not the first ever use.
Dating gets dicier with older terms, especially medieval ones. Before the advent of the printing press, books were expensive and rare. And most medieval texts that were produced have not survived, and the further back you go, the fewer texts we have. So, what we have is only a fraction of what once was. Plus, dating a medieval text is often difficult. We usually can tell with fair precision when a manuscript was copied, but the extant manuscripts are rarely the original copy, and we often don’t know when a medieval work was composed. This is especially true of many Old English poetic texts, those written before the Norman Conquest. Because the dating these very old texts is so uncertain, I generally don’t give dates for Old English examples.
In rare cases, we can tell with precision when a term was coined—this happens more often with scientific and technical terms than with other types, as writers in the sciences tend to note when they are using a term that is unfamiliar to their community. When this is the case, I will indicate it.
Dates of Scholarship and Proposed Etymologies
Often when one is searching for early uses of a term, one will find an early use that includes an etymology or explanation of the term’s origin. It is tempting to lend credibility to these early explanations. After all, they are closer to the origin of the term than we are today, we think that people in the past may have known better. But, as a general rule, it is a mistake to make this assumption. For one, more recent scholarship is almost always better. Recent work will take into account these older explanations, as well as all the scholarship that has been produced in the meantime. Also, today we have access to more texts from the relevant period than earlier scholars, even those who were working only a few decades ago, have. Simply stated, we know now more than we knew then. Another reason to take early explanations with a grain of salt is that often they are amateurish speculation, not based on any solid evidence.
Dates of OED Editions
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is the go-to reference for anything having to do with English words or phrases. It is massive and well-researched. It’s not perfect, but it’s as near to perfect as one could expect for a reference on such a comprehensive topic. It exists in three major editions, with various supplements and additions in between. The first edition was published in sections from 1884–1928. The second edition is a partial revision published in 1989; it incorporates the supplements to the dictionary that were produced between 1928–89 and revises and adds to of certain entries, but many of the entries were left untouched from the first edition. So, if you go to the OED website, many of the entries have been unchanged since the nineteenth century. The editors began work on the third edition in 2000. This edition is an ongoing, complete revision of the dictionary, with updates published online every three months.
That means when I reference the OED second edition on wordorigins.org, the entry could be considerably older than 1989, as much as a hundred years older. When referencing the third edition, I give the month and year of the relevant update.
When faced with an older OED entry, I do my best to find antedatings and updated scholarship from other sources, but I’m a single researcher, and there is only so much I can do.
Big List Dates
Finally, I come to the dates for entries on this site’s Big List. Please take a look at the date of the entry as you read it. Just as the general rule is to favor new scholarship over old, in my particular case you should favor my more recent work over my older work.
I started this website in 1997. Back then, I had no formal training in etymology or linguistics, and I had little access to high-quality scholarship and databases of texts. The earliest dates for entries in the Big List are from 2006 and 2007, but those dates are deceptive. I conducted a major overhaul and restructuring of the website in those years, but the content the entries is often older, going back as far as 1997. I’ve conducted another structural overhaul in 2020, but this time I’ve kept the original dates for older entries.
I’ve started methodically going through the old entries, updating them. But this is a work in progress; as of today, many of the old 1997 entries remain pretty much untouched (and misdated).
Another reason to favor the newer work is that I went back to graduate school in 2007, completing my PhD in medieval English language and literature in 2016. During that period, I greatly improved my knowledge and research skills. (Emphasis on the latter. The true value of a PhD is not that it makes you smarter or more knowledgeable—the subject-matter expertise of anyone with a PhD is incredibly narrow. What a PhD really teaches you is how to conduct solid research.) I also obtained access to the libraries at major research libraries, starting with the University of California, Berkeley, then on to the University of Toronto and Texas A&M, and most recently Princeton University. The research resources available to me now are for all practical purposes infinitely better than when I started. (This last is especially true since I’ve gained access to the libraries at Princeton. I don’t want to cast shade on those other libraries, which are all excellent, but Princeton has incredibly deep pockets and is willing to shell out money it takes for a truly astounding array of resources.)
