Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 4 December 2010

I’ve been having as much fun as Citizen Kane must have had on his first outing with Rosebud, for the Oxford English Dictionary has this week fitted a powerful engine of analysis into its online version.

issue 04 December 2010

I’ve been having as much fun as Citizen Kane must have had on his first outing with Rosebud, for the Oxford English Dictionary has this week fitted a powerful engine of analysis into its online version.

I’ve been having as much fun as Citizen Kane must have had on his first outing with Rosebud, for the Oxford English Dictionary has this week fitted a powerful engine of analysis into its online version. One of the things it does is to tell you where in print the first citation of various words comes from.

The Spectator boasts, if it ever boasts, 140 words first found in its pages, and another 3,469 quotations used by the OED to illustrate meanings. We already knew about agnostic, because R.H. Hutton (proprietor and co-editor of The Spectator from 1861 to 1897) later explained that the word was coined in 1869 by T.H.

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