Quotation Competition

Although the OED conducts extensive research on the history of individual terms, it is often a chance discovery in a historical text which has the greatest effect on our revision of an entry. Contributors have been supplying antedatings since the first fascicles of the OED were published in the 1880s. In the next newsletter we shall be awarding a prize of a bottle of champagne (even though we have recently been revising 'magnum') to the contributor of what represents, in the opinion of the Editor, the most significant quotation from a historical English text received over the previous six months.

The prize-winning quotation will not necessarily be the longest antedating. Sometimes a quotation from an unlikely source will reveal evidence which profoundly affects an etymology or our view of the subsequent semantic development of a term: amongst recent contributions Fritz Spiegel's early Liverpudlian attestation of 'jerrybuilding' would have fallen into this category. Or maybe it will be the discovery that Shakespeare, after all, did not coin a term with which he has been traditionally credited.

To qualify, the quotation must not already be contained in the OED's quotation files. Please send all candidates to the Editor, with a brief description of why you feel the quotation is especially significant. The Editor regrets that, for the purpose of the competition, his decision must be final.