4 October 2012
The editors of the Oxford English Dictionary are calling upon the public to help them find antedatings and early uses of a number of terms. Those terms, and the dates the OED currently has citations for in its files, are:
Bellini (1965)
FAQ (1989)
disco (1964)
cootie (1967) (in the sense of the imaginary children’s “germ")
to come in from the cold (1963)
blue-arsed fly (1970)
in your dreams! (1986)
Kwanzaa (1971)
Such appeals are nothing new, going back to the earliest days of the dictionary, but what’s neat about this appeal is that all the submissions are posted on the web. So you can see what work has been done to date.
Of course, the OED editors are always happy to receive emails containing antedatings and early citations for any word.
