The OED and "single-use" words

Conference item

The OED has always been a historical dictionary; but it also includes words without a history: those words for which only one illustrative quotation has been found. Are such words in essence synchronic, without a diachronic dimension, and if so is there something unique about them? Or are they simply accidents of time and usage, all "nonce" formations, suitable to only one particular occasion, and without great significance? Recent editing on OED-Online has been able to find more quotations for entries that previously had only one quotation, giving a large number of words a history they did not have before. This is because of the recent increase in the availability of databases such as EEBO, ECCO and Googlebooks that enable editors to supplement their use of the OED's own archives with reference to a huge array of resources. But there are also many words on OED-Online that are still singletons, apparently unique creations of a particular moment of utterance. Now that we can search over so much of published writing in English, we have a vantage point on 'rare' words that the original compilers of the NED could not have imagined. Is this a difference in kind, or only in degree? We cannot of course definitively say that a word was used in only one text. But it often feels as if this is probable. This paper examines the status of a range of edited entries on OED-Online that are represented by a single quotation. Between the start of the letter R, and RE-, there are 96 such words, from RAMICULOSE a. to RE v. They range over a broad historical period, and come from a wide range of sources, from the language of science to that of literature and poetry. I will conclude with a discussion about whether these 'isolates' in our vocabulary have any linking characteristics, if we can go so far as to talk about 'synchronic'-only words. A historical dictionary, in order to represent a history of the whole language, does need to cover even the isolated words that in themselves have no history, because their status says something about the language as a whole.

Authors: Goodland, G

• Alternative title: Presented at Researching Words 2 session
• Publication status: Not published
• Peer review status: Reviewed (other)
• Edition: Author's Original
• Language: English
• Keywords: Oxford English Dictionary
• Subjects: English Language and Literature