Charlotte Brewer has created a site called Examining the OED that promises to be extremely interesting. The About page says:
The Oxford English Dictionary is everywhere recognized as a comprehensive authority on the history of English from 1150 to the present day. Both literary and linguistic scholars, as well as many others, use the dictionary in order to find out more about words and their meanings, and to study and learn from the unrivalled stores of quotation evidence provided for the individual entries (drawn from literary and non-literary sources from the earliest days of English up to the present). In particular, OED‘s representation of language has crucially affected literary and linguistic understanding of how English has changed and developed, and of the contribution made to this process by individuals such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and other major writers.
Yet we know remarkably little about the methodology and underlying editorial practices of this enormous ‘engine of research’ (a term first used of the dictionary by one of its publishers, Charles Cannan, in 1905). Although OED is a landmark in lexicography and provides a reference point for many sorts of language studies, it is itself comparatively little studied. By exploring and analysing OED‘s quotations and quotation sources, this research project seeks to illuminate the foundations of the dictionary’s representation of the English language.
You can see in detail what’s available at the site map. (Thanks go once again to aldiboronti at Wordorigins, master of linguistic truffle-hunting.)
An interesting project – but how does one inform OED of usages of a word that pre-date their earliest quotations? I have come across two such usages in 19thc. letters: “wired in” meaning “clued up” and “persona” (predating the Jung quote cited by OED).
This is the relevant page for reader submissions to the OED.
OED.com/Readers/Research
Updated link for reader submissions:
https://public.oed.com/contribute-to-the-oed/submission-form/?cc=gb&lang=en&
Thanks! And it’s nice to see that the site is still going strong (and redirecting from the old URLs I used, which means I don’t have to edit the post).
Charlotte Brewer has brought this project to an end: the homepage now has a notice “Work on this project ceased in 2022 and the website is now static. For Charlotte Brewer’s current OED research, please go to the Murray Scriptorium.” She’s emerita now, but her site had a good run and there are a lot of valuable papers posted on it.
Among the earliest letters at the Murray Scriptorium there’s a wonderful exchange in 1879 between James Murray and George Eliot, in which he queried her on what she meant by “adust” and got the reply:
To which he answered:
Murray went ahead and entered the word on the strength of that single quotation:
And the editorial notes (extremely thorough) point out that OED3 “has since antedated the word to 1827 and found three other subsequent examples.”
(This is mentioned also in Sarah Ogilvie’s book, excerpted at Language Hat in Ogilvie on Ellis.)
A wonderful quote, thanks!
I suspect that when Milton wrote of the “Libyan air adust,” he was of course intending the Latin meaning, but being a poet, he also wanted his reader to taste some dust.
Makes sense to me.
That Milton quotation is also in the OED in the separate entry for the Latin-derived adust (which has a lot more citations, but they’re all “now historical” or “obsolete” or “now rare”, with no uses after 1919 except by historians).