Antedating the OED from the JSTOR Electronic Journal Archive

Yale University has received a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for a project investigating the capabilities of the JSTOR electronic journal archive for antedating the first uses of terms given by the OED. I am the principal investigator for the grant.

JSTOR was conceived by William G. Bowen, President of the Mellon Foundation, as a response to a range of pressures felt by libraries: escalating subscription costs for journals in the face of tighter budgets; rising expectations on the part of library users; limited stack space for long runs of journal backfiles; and preservation problems associated with storing paper volumes. The mission of JSTOR is to provide electronic access to backfiles of scholarly journals in many fields. Every issue of the included journals, with the exception of a three-to-five-year 'moving wall' of the most recent material, has been digitized into a database held by the University of Michigan.

The JSTOR database contains high-resolution images of each page linked to a text file created with optical character recognition software and hand-checked for accuracy. The text file is completely searchable. The disciplines covered by JSTOR at this time include anthropology, Asian studies, ecology, economics, education, finance, history, mathematics, philosophy, political science, population studies, and sociology. Literature has been announced as forthcoming. Because JSTOR's coverage encompasses crucial journals in multiple fields, with substantial chronological depth (some included journals go back as far as the 1800s) and with the ability to search the full text of those journals, JSTOR has enormous potential for uncovering early occurrences of terms from scholarship, science, economics, politics, philosophy, and education. I am using the Mellon grant to check the earliest uses of such terms in JSTOR against the earliest uses of the same terms in the OED.

I have already been able in hundreds of instances to retrieve occurrences of important terms antedating the earliest evidence recorded by the OED. For example, JSTOR improves the historical record for the words racism, Marxism, and postmodern, and the term United Nations. I list below some of the more significant terms whose datings I have pushed back. In some cases the citation is not from a JSTOR journal, but rather from a non-JSTOR source quoted by a JSTOR journal.

academia (OED 1956) 1950 Jrnl. Higher Education XXI.133 Contemporary criticism (the most recent fad to sweep Academia) has its score of neophytes.

affirmative action (OED 1935) 1906 Amer. Polit. Sci. Rev. I. 160 Under the act of 1906, the railroad must obey the order unless its suspension is secured by affirmative action of the courts.

ambivalence (OED 1924) 1914 Jrnl. Philosophy, Psychology & Scientific Methods XI. 101 In a paper on 'The Freudian Idea of Ambivalence', President Hall said that neither paidologists nor pediatricians have ever ascribed such importance to childhood as do the Freudians.

apolitical (OED 1952) 1942 Amer. Polit. Sci. Rev. XXXVI.1039-40 The states have regarded themselves as 'sovereign' entities, not subordinated to any superior political power nor guided in their power politics by considerations of an a-political, i.e., power-alien, nature.

blue collar (OED 1950) 1942 Amer. Sociol. Rev. VII. 323 The transition from blue-collar to white-collar work can be taken as a rough index of upward occupational movement.

common market (OED 1954) 1893 F.W.Taussig in Quart. Jrnl. Econ. VIII. 12 The wool that might compete most directly with the bulk of the domestic product is that of the Argentine Republic...the duty prohibits its importation into the United States. So long has it been prohibited that the trade has lost that one infallible measure of comparison which is given by sale in a common market.

counterculture (OED 1970) 1951 Talcott Parsons The Social System 522 If, however, the culture of the deviant group, like that of the delinquent gang, remains a 'counter-culture' it is difficult to find the bridges by which it can acquire influence over wider circles.

datum 2. (OED 1899) 1884 Annals of Mathematics I. 38 Having computed t from the original data we find h from this series.

diachronic 2. (OED 1927) 1918 Jrnl. Philosophy, Psychology & Scientific Methods XV. 55 There are two linguistic problems: the synchronic problem, which concerns the states of language, ordinary systems, and the diachronic problem, which concerns the transformations of which all parts of language are the theatre.

double standard (OED 1951) 1912 Amer. Polit. Sci. Rev. VI. 652 Mr. Hecker urges that the double standard of morality for the sexes must gradually be abolished.

existentialist (OED 1945) 1930 Sidney Hook in Jrnl. Philosophy XXVII. 370 Husserl...uses the formalists arguments against the existentialist position...and then turns around and uses the existentialist's arguments... against the formalist.

fascist n. (OED 1928) 1925 Polit. Sci. Quart. XL. 160 A specially constituted Central Nominating Committee of five active Fascists...actually made up the lists.

free world (OED 1955) 1949 World Politics I. 542 Since it is American policy on which the future of the free world seems to depend, it is high time for the public debate to commence.

functionalism (OED 1914) 1894 Polit. Sci. Quart. IX. 123 The Indian village cannot compare with what some writers grandiloquently style the 'functionalism' of the early New England township.

futuristic 2. (OED 1958) 1908 Amer. Hist. Rev. XIV. 116 The surprising diction...is but suggestive of the editors' German blood and training. Stillstand, ethicality, ...futuristic...such are a few of the strange words with which they enrich the English tongue.

Hispanic (OED 1972) 1905 Amer. Hist. Rev. X. 483 Mr. Archer M. Huntington has presented his Spanish collection to the Hispanic Society of America.

leftist (OED 1924) 1901 Polit. Sci. Quart. XVI. 386 The new Cabinet, as formed by Signor Zonardelli...was predominantly Leftist.

Marxism (OED 1897) 1887 Quart. Jrnl. Econ. II. 98 Of late, a slight shade of Marxism may be detected in some of these documents.

Native American n. (OED 1974) 1931 Mississippi Valley Hist. Rev. XVII. 602 Imbued with the old idea that the native Americans were the descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, Adair...took up the study of Hebrew.

neoconservative (OED 1964) 1938 Polit. Sci. Quart. LIII. 402 In the works of the neo-conservative Frantz... middle-class democratic and conservative-authoritarian ideas interpenetrate completely.

postmodern (OED 1949) 1936 Jrnl. Higher Education VII. 379 The small volumes of the Renaissance Society of Chicago carry appreciation of 'modern' European art into the post-modern forms of surrealisme and die neue Sachlichkeit and include a rediscovery of Seurat.

privatize (OED 1969) 1940 Amer. Sociol. Rev. V. 482 We cultivate a lack of confidence towards those who are our partners and our leaders, and we privatize our existence. 1949 World Politics II. 60 The attempt to treat the war and reconstruction loans...as private transactions between bankers and borrowers, and to 'privatize' reparations obligations, imposed complex and burdensome economic arrangements.

racism (OED 1936) 1935 Amer. Polit. Sci. Rev. XXIX. 580 Hatred of the Western parliamentary system was the most attractive plank of its [the National Socialist Party's] political platform, as racism was the sociological incentive for the masses.

racist (OED 1932) 1927 Amer. Polit. Sci. Rev XXI. 383 That such arbitrary tactics were not applied solely to the Left Opposition is made clear by the complaint of the Racist deputy Eckhardt.

role model (OED 1957) 1944 Amer. Sociol. Rev. IX. 666 The social worker has at her disposal a carefully developed role model.

sabbatical n. (OED 1934 [Webster]) 1932 Jrnl. Higher Education III. 197 State or municipal universities and technological institutions were more likely than other types to have a fixed policy governing the granting of sabbaticals.

set theory (OED 1937) 1926 Annals of Mathematics (2d ser.) XXVII. 487 An important idea in set theory is that of relativity.

sociolinguistic (OED 1949) 1942 Jrnl. Philosophy XXXIX. 355 The attempt to circumvent the cultural, socio-linguistic, or historical responsiveness of cognition by an operational theory of meaning results most successfully in an operational transcription of the forms of procedure established by validity-norms.

solar 1.e. (OED 1972) 1914 Jrnl. Polit. Econ. XXII. 714 The author [believes] that science will furnish inventions that will economize the use of fossil fuels and make more and more available other sources of energy-power from vegetable sources, from solar energy, from tides, from waterfall, and from wind.

tenure 1.c. (OED 1957) 1955 Jrnl. Higher Education XXVI. 70 What are the requirements to gain tenure?

third world (OED 1963) 1958 Western World Dec. (heading) How the Third World splits NATO.

United Nations (OED 1942) 1918 Raleigh C. Minor A Republic of Nations 27 For the sake of convenience of discussion, arbitrary terms have been used in designating the union [a federal league of nations proposed by Minor], the compact, and the officials supposed to act under it. Thus the union is spoken of as 'The United Nations'; the compact of government, as the 'Constitution' of the United Nations.

In addition to such antedatings, I have used JSTOR to demonstrate that the most controversial word-usage of the late 20th century, the employment of hopefully as a sentence adverb, was common decades before the time it has usually been said to have emerged. This usage, according to many commentators, sprang fully-formed into the language around 1960 (there is an isolated 1932 citation in the OED). However, a JSTOR search for hopefully retrieves 36 examples of the sentence-adverbial use between 1933 and 1960.

As a postscript, I should mention that a search on another electronic resource, Making of America, extends the usage's history even further back, yielding an 1851 occurrence in Thomas J. Taylor's book Essay on Slavery. My researches on hopefully, and the potential of electronic historical texts generally for tracing word-histories, are discussed in a forthcoming article of mine in the journal American Speech.

Fred R. Shapiro is Associate Librarian for Public Services and Lecturer in Legal Research at Yale Law School. He is the editor of the Oxford Dictionary of American Legal Quotations and co-editor of Trial and Error: an Oxford Anthology of Legal Stories, and has been a prolific contributor to the OED since 1978.