The curious vocabulary of English between proter and purposive

From time to time people write to notify us that Coleridge used the term psychosomatic several years earlier than the first attestation given in the OED (Charles Reade's novel Hard Cash, published in 1863 and exposing the mid-Victorian system of lunatic asylums). The publication online of the current instalment of new and revised entries allows us to rectify that. Coleridge's now stands as the earliest recorded use of the word:

1830 S. T. Coleridge Shorter Wks. & Fragm. (1995) II. ii. 1444 Hope and Fear.. have slipt out their collars, and no longer run in couples.. from the Kennel of my Psycho-somatic Ology.

Coleridge used the word in the sense ‘involving or depending on both the mind and the body’. The modern medical and psychological sense of the word came along rather later: in 1938, according to the previous edition of the OED, and from the pen of Samuel Beckett in Murphy. But new research now shows that Beckett cannot be credited with the introduction of this specialist use, as it appears some 24 years earlier in Boris Sidis' Symptomatology, psychognosis, and diagnosis of psychopathic diseases, first published in Boston in 1914. Beckett is still credited by the OED with the first recorded use of several other words (athambia, nucleant, panpygoptosis, plutolater, plutomanic, prostisciutto, pugnozzle, vermigrade, wantum, wardee, and zeep). Coleridge is credited with the first use of over 600 words, often of a rather scholarly or rarefied character.

This leads us into the current publication batch proter-purposive. The revised range of the OED published on 13 September 2007 contains 2,785 entries, bringing the total number of main entries in the OED to 261,120. The dictionary's 590,653 lemmas (roughly, words and expressions which are included in the dictionary) are illustrated by 2,845,029 quotations and represent 709,136 different meanings.

The range is striking for the variety of vocabulary it offers. These are some of the more significant words revised in this release:

protest protestant protocol protoplasm prototype protract proud prove proverb proverbial provide providence province provincial provision provisional provocation provoke prow prowess prowl proximity proxy prude prudent prudential prune Prussian pry psalm pseud- psychedelic psychiatric psychic psychical psychoanalysis psychological psychology psychopath psychosis psychotherapy psychotic pterodactyl pub puberty public publican publication publicity publish publisher pucker pudding puddle puff puffin pug pugnacious pukka pull pulley pulmonary pulp pulpit pulsar pulse pulverize pummel pump pumpkin pun punch punctual punctuate punctuation puncture pundit pungent punish punishment punitive punk punt puny pup pupil puppet puppy purchase pure purgatory purge purify purist puritan puritanical purity purl purple purport purpose

As in most of the letter P we encounter a fairly strongly Romance- (as opposed to Germanic-) based set of words. The range brings to an end the pro- words, races through pru- (noting on the way an earlier example at prudence, not connected with the economy but in the obsolete sense ‘a gathering or group of vicars’), before entering the technical world of words starting with psy- and pt-. After this, the pu- words such as punch, pungent, punk, and purge seem somewhat short and pugnacious.

The two largest entries in the range are public and pull. Public should be compared with private, another recently revised entry (published online in June 2007). The word private is first recorded from the year 1395, and derives directly from Latin; public dates (according to the evidence) from a year earlier, in 1394, but comes from classical Latin by way of Anglo-Norman and Middle French. English privy (early thirteenth century, from Anglo-Norman and Old and Middle French) shared many senses with the later private. Middle French privat is not recorded until around 1500. The adjective private is edited into 26 subsenses, but public has only 16; the concept of restriction in private provides it with more semantic contexts than are available to the more open public. Both words have generated around 110 compounds starting with private or public recorded in the dictionary. Public house is a good example of an entry which shows the improved level of documentation nowadays available to editors: in its earliest meaning (‘a building belonging or open to the community at large’) it was previously dated to 1574; recently research shows that it dates from at least 1560 (John Knox's Answer to a great nomber of blasphemous cauillations written by an Anabaptist, and aduersarie to God's eternal predestination). The modern sense (an inn or hostelry) was dated to 1768 (Samuel Foote), and now dates from 1655. We continue to appreciate more about former societies through changes in vocabulary

Pull (the verb) is also of a substantial size, and provided many editorial challenges. It dates from the Old English period, and the entry contains around 175 senses and subsenses, including many phrasal and idiomatic uses. The best comparison may be with the soon-to-be-published entry for push (a smaller entry, and one which currently contains around 50 senses).

The entries only show themselves to their best on inspection, so I would encourage you to take a look. Good examples to start off with include: puffin (reassessment of the etymology - though still uncertain; reassessment of the attribution of quotations between the main senses 'Manx shearwater' and the modern 'puffin', now first recorded from John Ray); puerperal (the fever was so called over fifty years earlier than previously thought); puff pastry (known first under this name in the eighteenth, not the nineteenth, century); and puftaloon (which is worth examining without any particular reason!)

Updating revised entries

Readers of the dictionary continue to suggest improvements to revised entries. Often these improvements consist of earlier documentary evidence, but sometimes they range over other areas of text. The republishing of revised OED entries mentioned last quarter (Restructuring of compounds and phrases on OED Online) allows the editors to incorporate these changes, and with this release the process now reaches back from proteose to necial. It is hoped that the process (encompassing all revised entries back to M) with be completed in December's release

Many of the amendments are bibliographical (e.g. quotations reverified in earlier or better editions; short-titles standardized). Other notable improvements in this range include:

numismatics redated from 1803 to 1790

ooh-la-la (adjective) redated from 1940 to 1929

offing (noun) sense 1a: corrections to the definition of this nautical sense

offside (noun): the nautical sense has been predated from 1719 to 1669 and it now becomes sense 1, ousting from this position the sense formerly regarded as the oldest (relating to the offside of a carriage or car)

nudum pactum: an 18th-century example has been added (from Thomas Jefferson), filling a previous gap in the evidence

noria: a change has been made to the term's geographical spread mentioned in the definition

This are just a few of the additional changes made. I am grateful to those readers/users who supplied this new information.

BBC2's Balderdash & Piffle

The eight-part BBC2 series has now been broadcast, and twenty-eight of the forty words on the Wordhunt list have been improved by new findings. These changes can be seen on the OED's Balderdash & Piffle web pages, and will make their way to the main online database in December.

The majority of the Wordhunt list consisted of modern informal terms for which early documentary evidence has proved hard to track down. Notable successes include antedatings for Bloody Mary, flipflop, Gordon Bennett, mucky pup, prat, shaggy-dog story, TWOC, and wolf-whistle.