Confections à la mode: revising the OED's etymologies

OED News has featured numerous articles describing some of the ways in which the Third Edition of the OED is improving upon its eminent predecessor as a record of the history of English vocabulary. Less has been said of the advances that have been made in the historical lexicography of other languages in the century since the OED was conceived. The etymological component of the Dictionary in particular, largely unrevised since Murray's day, has benefited hugely from the improved lexicographical resources now at hand for languages other than English. The detailed and accurate datings provided for words and their senses in Dutch, Swedish, Italian, and French have thrown new light on the history of many of the words English has borrowed from its neighbours over the years, illuminating both the routes by which they entered our language and the course of their development within it. As a result, thanks largely to the work of our European counterparts, the OED can now paint a better picture of historical contact between English and other cultures at all historical periods. As luck would have it, this is shown particularly well in a semantic field close to my heart: the vocabulary of food.

Where loanwords are concerned, the primary function of the foreign language dictionaries in revising OED etymologies has been to establish beyond doubt that a word was in use in the donor language (and hence available for borrowing) by the date at which it first appears in English written sources. Doubts may creep in about the likelihood that a word had entered English through borrowing from a particular language if the date of the word's first use in English is significantly earlier than that of its first appearance in the supposed donor language; this sometimes leads us to place a query against the accepted account of a word's origin, or even to overturn it. For example, the entry for marmalade in the Second Edition of the OED describes the word as being a borrowing from French marmelade; however, our own researchers have unearthed an occurrence of marmalade in English domestic papers as early as 1480, whereas the documentation in the major historical dictionary of French, Trésor de la Langue Française (TLF), gives no sign of the French word until 1573. The possibility of the word having been borrowed directly from Portuguese marmelada now seems more likely, and our revised etymology says as much.

More often than not, however, the dates of first record for foreign words borrowed into English serve to confirm and support the etymology given by the previous editions of the Dictionary. Take the word meringue, for instance. Despite extensive searches for earlier examples of the word in English, our first record still comes from the 1706 edition of Phillips's New World of Words, where it is identified as a word of French origin. The Second Edition of the OED accordingly gives an etymology from French meringue, but can find no evidence for its use in French before 1739. Thanks to TLF, we can now trace the French word back to a cookbook of 1691, nearly twenty years before the first attestation in English. The further etymology of the word remains as obscure to us as it was to Murray's team, but we can at least supply a chronology to confirm that the word (and presumably the confection) came to us from the French.

In the quest for the true origin of culinary vocabulary there are many pitfalls for the unwary etymologist, and the foreign language dictionaries have often been invaluable in steering us away from them. One source of error is the attitude, prevalent for much of the 20th century, that the finest cuisine is French cuisine, which might lead one to expect a French origin for culinary terms - certainly those whose form coincides with a French word. The picture can, however, be more complex, as in the case of a pair of terms for the same cut of meat, medallion and médaillon: our research suggests that the apparently French form médaillon is first used by an English writer - S. Beaty-Pownall in the 'Queen' Cookery books - in 1900, three years before the first record of this sense in French; the first record of the 'English' form, meanwhile, is in the writings of Escoffier (1907), a Frenchman working at the Ritz in London.

Examples like this go some way towards showing how far the improvements we are now able to make on the lexicographical achievements of our predecessors are dependent on those of our colleagues in Europe. At a time when the main contenders for Britain's favourite dish are pasta and chicken tikka masala, it is worth pointing out that in lexicography, as in cookery, we have much to learn from our neighbours.