From barmaid to "Balderdash": OED appeals

In May 2005 the OED launched a ‘Wordhunt’ in conjunction with the BBC. The Wordhunt appealed for members of the public to send evidence relating to the use and history of fifty words. The appeal attracted an overwhelming response, and provided the basis for the BBC2 television series, ‘Balderdash and Piffle’, which was screened in January and February this year, the first instalment attracting 3.2 million viewers. While the idea of using television to appeal for help from such a wide audience is a new one, the use of a list of appeals for help from the general public in researching entries is almost as old as the Dictionary itself.

The first OED appeal surviving in the Dictionary archives dates from 1857. It sought volunteers to read and excerpt quotations from particular texts, not for help with particular words. A similar, more famous ‘Appeal to the English-Speaking and English-Reading Public’ followed when James Murray became editor twenty years later. Between 1879 and 1880 Murray issued several lists of works that people could usefully read for quotations.

The first appeals list seeking help with particular words appeared in early 1861, and was the work of Herbert Coleridge, the Dictionary’s first editor. It took the form of a twenty-four-page pamphlet listing words for which additional quotations were needed, beginning with aback and abandon, and going as far as the end of the letter D. Similar appeals covering E–L and M–Z appeared over the next year, but Coleridge did not live to see them: he died in April 1861, and the task of completing them fell to Frederick Furnivall, who took over as editor. He recruited numerous ‘sub-editors’ to take charge of separate letters of the alphabet, and subsequently issued much expanded appeals on behalf of some of them, beginning with William Gee of Boston, Lincolnshire, whose twenty-four-page list of words beginning with B appeared in 1863. Furnivall sometimes included appeals for other sorts of assistance in these pamphlets:

A fresh appeal to the Contributors must again be made to help in the sub-editing. Two successive sub-editors of M—not a heavy letter—have thrown up their task.

After various setbacks in the 1860s and 1870s, James Murray was appointed editor in 1879. He issued his first appeals list within months of assuming the role, and further lists appeared until at least 1896. Murray appealed for evidence for words such as acrid (before 1732), barmaid (before 1772), cook one’s goose (any evidence), and death-warrant (before 1855). Versions of the lists were published in the journal Notes and Queries in the hope that they would reach a wider audience.

Charles Onions continued the tradition of using appeals lists to solicit help from the public in researching particular words when he began work on the Supplement to the OED (which was published in 1933). Appeals for words such as cardiogram (before 1888) and care-free (before 1901) appeared in The Periodical (a journal then published by OUP) and in Notes & Queries from October 1928 until 1932. Similar lists were issued during preliminary work on the revised Supplement under the editorship of Robert Burchfield between 1958 and 1961.

The next vehicle for the OED appeals list was the New OED Newsletter, produced from 1984 until the publication of the Second Edition of the OED in 1989. The first issue to contain a list was the May 1985 edition, which appealed, among other things, for uses of butterfly bush (before 1934), ghetto blaster (before 1983), and ditsy—which also appears on the 2005 BBC Wordhunt list—(before 1978).

In 1995 the newsletter was revived with the title OED News, and the tradition of the appeals list was revived too. The first issue sought help with words and senses under consideration for the third Additions volume, including big girl’s blouse (before 1983), keyboarder (before 1971), and machinable before (1960), and later lists appealed for help with entries being revised or created for the Third Edition of the OED.

The Dictionary continues to benefit enormously from the public response to OED appeals. Some impressive antedatings have been sent in as a result of the OED News lists, including miaow (verb, from 1963 to 1632), to go the extra mile (1957 to 1907), milk drink (1935 to 1863), great minds think alike (1873 to 1755), and mirror-ball (1978 to 1888). An expanded list of OED News appeals list successes can be found on the OED website. Similarly, the public response to the Wordhunt and to the transmission of the six ‘Balderdash and Piffle’ programmes has been excellent, and so far twenty entries have been added or adapted on the basis of new evidence found by viewers. Such was the success of the series that theWordhunt is to be extended, and a special seventh programme will be made to be shown at Easter 2006. It will feature the best new evidence sent in by some of the four thousand viewers who responded to the series.