Mind your language | 4 September 2010

Newspapers recently carried reports of a ‘secret vault’ at the Oxford English Dictionary containing words rejected for inclusion.

Newspapers recently carried reports of a ‘secret vault’ at the Oxford English Dictionary containing words rejected for inclusion. Well, I suppose one way of keeping a secret is to publish it in a work of reference, for the OED explains that its ‘Quotations Room contains thousands of words for which we have only a single example, many of them dating back decades or even centuries: usurance has been awaiting a second example since 1912, and abrasure since 1827!’

‘Words that are only used for a short period of time,’ it says, ‘or by a very small number of people, are not included.’ Yet the dictionary contains thousands of words of which only one contextual quotation has been discovered, from abricotine to zonulet. There are even ‘ghost words’ that have never been spoken, and derive from mistranscriptions or other dictionaries’ mistakes.

A term coined by Sir James Murray especially for use in the New English Dictionary (as the OED was originally called) was nonce-word. It means ‘a word apparently used only “for the nonce”, i.e. on one specific occasion or in one specific text or writer’s works’. Sir James gave it its first outing in 1884, in the very first fascicle of the dictionary. The only trouble is that, since the 1970s, the word nonce, deriving from criminal slang, has been used for ‘a sexual deviant; a person convicted of a sexual offence, especially child abuse’. Never mind.

Some nonce-words are noncier than others. In 1834, writing from Martinique, Trelawney Wentworth referred to ‘the French people, always so amusing, so gesticulacious and frisky’. It’s a good phrase. But, in Fraser’s Magazine for 1830, we find: ‘It is snuff which makes the Frenchman so lively, so gesticularious, so frisky.’