It's earlier than you think...

As the OED's commitment to releasing new material online each quarter begins to hit its stride, I, as one of the editors responsible for this material, am starting to notice a recurring theme, indeed a recurring phrase heard in our discussions about the words we are working on: 'It's much earlier than I thought...'

A major element of the research work we carry out on a word before clearing it for publication is to ensure that every possible effort has been made to locate (and quote in the entry) the very first use in writing of the word. To this end we will consult, among other things, in-house electronic files; our unique paper 'database' of filing cabinet upon filing cabinet of slips, each carrying information about a particular word, assembled over more than a century; and the ever-increasing range of electronic archives available over the Internet. The upshot of this concentration of resources and effort is frequently - usually - that a word, phrase, or sense is older than one had initially assumed.

Often this merely elicits a slight 'oh!' of intrigued curiosity. 'Grunge', the genre of rock music I associate with bands from Seattle in the early 1990s, has been around as a word referring to the same loud, distorted, guitar sound since 1973. 'Reality television', programming following real people in their everyday lives, or in an artificial situation, has only really come to my attention in the last few years, with the appearance of shows such as 'Big Brother' and 'Survivor'. But the phrase first shows up, in exactly the same sense, in 1978. 'Reality programming' is even earlier, dating back to 1962. People could win lottery 'roll-overs' in 1981. Computer data has been protected by 'firewalls' since 1982, and linked together by 'hypertext' since 1965. Sometimes, though, I have found that the discrepancy between the rough first date that I have assumed will emerge from research, and the actual date that emerges, is genuinely surprising. The existence of a 1714 quotation for 'European Union' shows how long that particular debate has been raging. People have been complaining about entertainment being 'dumbed down' since 1933. Governments have appointed 'czars' (or 'tsars') to oversee the implementation of policy in a particular area (a phenomenon often associated with the last decade, especially with 'drug czar') since 1942.

However, in some cases, one's first assumption can be proved right. Research uncovered evidence of 'on-line newspapers' being read in 1939. This was really quite alarming. (Although 'online' is already in the OED, we are as committed to updating words whose primary meaning has shifted substantially, as we are to documenting new vocabulary, as quickly as possible.) Had wartime information distribution reached hitherto unsuspected levels of complexity? Did a malevolent time-travelling writer have a grudge against the OED? Thankfully, neither of these things proved true - at least in this case. It quickly became clear we were dealing with a meaning of 'online' that had previously escaped documentation by dictionaries, meaning 'situated on the route of a railway line; in use on a railway line'. Other evidence for this sense was found. We were not uncovering evidence of a thirties Internet; these were newspapers operating in towns situated on a particular railway.

This won't, of course, stop me from dropping the fact that there were online newspapers in 1939 into conversation every now and then.