September 2001 newsletter

One of the great pleasures of adding new items to the OED is the process of pushing back into linguistic history to find their first usage. Although many contemporary words and phrases do, as expected, have their origins in the recent past, sometimes assiduous research turns up surprisingly early evidence; as Graeme Diamond demonstrates below, it's often 'earlier than you think'. Also in this issue, Principal Bibliographer Veronica Hurst shows us the bibliographical work that goes on beneath the tip of the iceberg of an OED quotation paragraph, while Andrew Ball examines the literary reputation of one of the OED's thousands of cited authors, the 18^th century writer Eliza Haywood.

This issue of OED News will be the last to be edited by me; from December Peter Gilliver takes over as editor. Compiling the OED's newsletter has provided me with a great deal of fun over the last three years. I hope readers will continue to enjoy their regular features while appreciating a fresh new voice!

This newsletter is available to download. (To view the file you need the Adobe Acrobat Reader.)