Unconsidered trifles: some snapping up done by the Historical Reading Programme

In recent years much of the work of the OED's reading programmes has been directed towards modern texts. Historical antedatings have been supplied in their thousands by scholars, but to complement this we have now set up the OED's Historical Reading Programme, to cover texts mainly from the period 1500-1800. Our readers are searching not only for antedatings, but also for later evidence for obsolescent terminology, supplementary evidence for words inadequately attested, unrecorded significant variants, information which might cause us to revise a definition or etymology, and senses or uses inadequately covered by existing entries.

Literature and writing by notable literary figures was in general covered thoroughly in the first edition, and more fruitful material for the purpose of supplementing historical coverage is comparatively vernacular language such as is often found in diaries, letters and memoirs, the language of particular trades or interests (e.g. pirates, coffee manufacture, varnishing, funeral customs) and varieties other than southern or Standard English.

We are trying particularly to cover historical sources of Welsh, Irish, and Scottish provenance or content. Texts read include the Diary of Bulstrode Whitelocke (c1630-75), Chirk Castle Accounts (1605-1753), Southwell's Supplication (a1595), Whitford's Werke for Housholders (1530), Aikin's Journal of a Tour Through North Wales (1796), the Diary and General Expenditure Book of William Cunningham of Craigends (1673-80), and the diaries of William Bulkeley of Brynddu, Anglesey (1734-43, 1747-60), Elizabeth Freke of Cork (1671-1714) and Thomas Brown of Kirkwall (1675-93).

Some recent antedatings discovered include mint tea (1764 from 1872), coal-hewer (1679 from 1887), gregory bag (1755 from 1897), begging letter (1597 from 1846), inverted comma (1735 from 1789), to send round the hat (1740 from 1857), Sevillian (1643 from 1830), walking boot (1595 from 1854), boot-heel (1676 from 1870), ice-boat (1748 from 1819 Pantologia, in Hume's Letters), Florence-oil (1750 from 1858, Simmonds' Dictionary of Trade Products), antiquarium (1651 from 1881), super-legal (1648 from 1920) and colcannon (1735 from 1785 Grose, surprisingly, in the diary of Welsh William Bulkeley).

Phrases are often especially fruitful, e.g. no peace for the wicked and bona fides (both 1732, from 1944), lying-in-state (1852 from 1923) and to burn one's bridges (1745 from 1892), as are compounds, such as requisition man (1794 from 1911), dirty dog (1743 from 1928), rat poison (1674 from 1844), beer cellar (1673 from 1865), lane-end (1557 from 1898), day-watch (1556 from 1837), Common Prayer Book (1634/5 from 1682/3 ) and East India Company (1647 from 1702).

Antedatings of the attributive use of penetration and japan, and of stocking cap (1902), whipcord (1895) and wire pliers (1888) were all amongst material found in Robert Hooke's Diary in the 1670s.

It is particularly gratifying to antedate dictionaries or glossaries, as at jerquer (1674 from 1706 Phillips), irreducibleness (1690 Pepys from 1828 Webster) and wire pliers (1888, Lockwood's Dictionary of Terms in Mechanical Engineering) or find evidence where OED has none, e.g. as supplied by a quotation from 1800 for bipontine.

Such reading against existing entries is a pleasing counterpart to the broad sweep of our general English and North American current reading, and will clearly result in a vastly improved quotation record in our revised entries.