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An interesting (new?) feature of the OED I recently stumbled upon. Enter your birth year, and it'll tell you the word that arrived along with you. It seems to only provide a single word ... maybe the first for the year or the most cited. Not sure. But still a fun discovery. Try it at the link below:
http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2013/12/oed-birthday-words/
EmmettRedd said: An anno-aptonym?
Maybe "anno-aptonym" should be in the OED too. Weird, but my birthday word was "blast-off" and if you've ever clicked on the Heimhenge link you've seen what I do these days. Been into astronomy since, around age 6-7, when my uncle showed me the Moon through a telescope he built.
Then again, maybe not so weird ... lots of people who grew up during the cold war space race ended up in some STEM career. My uncle ended up working in the computer industry, and I ended up as a science teacher. In a way, that OED feature tracks trends in society by adopting words that emerged in response to societal changes. I found it strange that "acronym" surfaced in the 40s ... thought that word was a LOT older, but it probably owes its origin to the prolific use of acronyms by the military, which had just wrapped up WWII in that decade.
OK, so I'm still curious about just how far back the word "acronym" goes. OED's claim that it appeared in the 40s just seemed too late to me. The Online Etymology Dictionary also concurs with OED as the 1940s for its appearance. But this is what Ngrams shows. If you slide your cursor along the horizontal axis, you'll see it goes from zero hits to a small but finite number around 1835. Then it drops back to zero, and again shows limited usage on and off until it hits the 1940s, after which it never again shows zero and continues to climb. I know Ngrams has its limitations, but I'm curious about this on-off pattern of citations.
Does anyone know how long the OED waits after a word's first use in print before its official inclusion as a "new" word? Or do they wait for continued use over a period of time, so as not to include words that become obsolete before their next OED goes to print?
I added "acronym" to your n-gram viewer and changed the time scale to 1800-1835, then took a look at some of the citations.
There apparently was a Bernard Acronym, a published surgeon.
Sam Johnson's English Dictionary, as improved by Todd and Abridged bu Chalmers, in 1828, had a definition for acronycal, saying that "The rising or setting of the stars is called acronym when they either ??pear above or sink below the horizon at the time of sunset lt is opposed to cosmical" Not what we think of acronym meaning, but there, none the less.
I think it must be tough to be a lexicographer. You'd be expected to be an authority on everything, and no matter how much work you put into a word. someone is going to pull out something written, probably by a semi-literate fool, that says you're wrong.
And between changes to spelling over the years, deteriorating paper, and ordinary errors in character recognition software, it's hard to search for what you want in scans of old books unless you already know where to look.
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