Scientific terminology

Extensive work on the history of science by scholars throughout the twentieth century has meant that the Dictionary is now better able to document the development of scientific knowledge and the vocabulary used to describe it. Entries in the Dictionary for scientific words are revised by specialist science editors on the Dictionary's staff, in conjunction with expert external advisers. New scientific vocabulary is identified from the findings of the Dictionary's various extensive reading programmes. It should not be surprising that the First Edition of the Dictionary tended to rely for much of its scientific component on a small number of key sources. Additional reading of a far wider range of scientific sources allows the editors to delve more closely into the origins of this vocabulary, and the Dictionary's own research is supplemented by general academic research into the history of scientific vocabulary (see, for example, R. McConchie, Lexicography and Physicke: Oxford 1997).

The early section of M includes a large scientific component, such as magnetism, magnesium, and magnitude (the apparent brightness of a star). It is interesting to see from the evidence of the vocabulary how the terminology used to describe significant scientific discoveries often seeped into general usage in extended meanings, as poets and others picked up these terms and incorporated them into their own work. Scientific investigation of the properties of magnetism in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, including the discovery that the Earth itself exerted a magnetic force, had a significant effect on aspects of metaphysical imagery. The first recorded use of the word magnetic occurs in Donne's Anatomie of the World (1611):

She that had all Magnetique force alone,
To draw, and fasten sundred parts in one.

Detailed bibliographical information is given, wherever possible, for the sources of scientific vocabulary coined outside English. In such instances it is instructive to see when the equivalent term appears to have been first used in English-language sources. Magnolia, for example, was coined in Latin by Plumier after the name of the French botanist Pierre Magnol in 1703, and is first recorded in English after forty-five years in 1748; the name of the mineral magnetite (replacing the earlier Magneteisenstein), however, was coined in German by Haidinger in 1845, and is first found in English six years later in 1851. Parallel developments in other languages tend to demonstrate the expansion of scientific terminology throughout the international scientific community.