12 February 2009
Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were both born 200 years ago today. Ben Zimmer has a post on the Word Routes blog over at the Visual Thesaurus site on the two men’s respective contributions to the English lexicon.
Zimmer counts 144 words in the OED with Darwin as the first cited author, but only one from Lincoln, the word Michigander.
It’s an interesting post, but I’m not sure how Zimmer got the number 144. You have to do considerable disentangling of authors with the same name (Charles’s grandfather, Erasmus, was a prolific writer, and Charles’s children wrote as well, and his son, Francis, co-authored some papers with Charles), but whatever the number actually is, 144 isn’t far off.
