2021-06-16
28 分钟Coming up on Word Matters, a bit of time travel.
I'm Emily Rooster,
and Word Matters is produced by Merriam-Webster in collaboration with New England Public Media.
On each episode, Merriam-Webster editors Neil Servin, Amin Shea, Peter Sakalowski,
and I explore some aspect of the English language from the dictionary's vantage point.
Scroll down below the definition at an entry in the Merriam-Webster.com dictionary and you will see the phrase first known use,
followed by a year or century.
What precisely does it mean?
And how do we determine just what follows the phrase?
Today, we have Amon Shea and the inexact, exacting art of finding the earliest uses of a word.
Mark Robinson wrote in with several questions,
but one of them was such an interesting question that we really feel
like it deserves a fuller examination or explication.
The question he has is, when you talk about the earliest appearance of a word,
is that something you search digitally, or do you have large rooms full of all dictionaries?
And the answer to that, of course, is both, and many other things as well.
And it raises this very, very interesting question, which is,
what does it mean when you see in a dictionary that some date is the first known use of a word?
It's something that I personally feel is one of the most frequently misinterpreted bits of information in all lexicography.
In that sense,