The virtual linguist

James' Medicinal Dictionary

The Medicinal Dictionary was published in three volumes between 1743 and 1745, and was written by the physician Robert James. He was an old schoolmate of Samuel Johnson (albeit six years older), and the two men became friends later in London. The dictionary is mostly of interest nowadays for the parts of it that Samuel Johnson wrote for his friend. James later helped Johnson with medical definitions in his own dictionary (which came out in 1755).

There are a number of citations in the OED from James’ Medicinal Dictionary. About half of them begin with A. There is no mention that Johnson wrote these, but apparently Johnson did help out more with the entries at the beginning of the alphabet. Here they are:
abaptiston: type of trepan
abort (noun): aborted foetus
acaleph: jellyfish-like creature
acedia: listlessness
acne: skin complaint
acnestis: this is one of those words that often come up in lists of amusing words, or lists of words that you didn’t know there was a word for. Ammon Shea drew attention to it when he read the OED from start to finish (see this previous post). The first citation is attributed to James, and it encapsulates exactly what the acnestis is: “Acnestis, that Part of the Spine of the Back, which reaches from .. the Part betwixt the Shoulder-blades, to the Loins. This Part seems to have been originally called so in Quadrupeds only, because they cannot reach it to scratch.”
acrasia: intemperance, excess
acroasis: oral discourse, lecture
action: influence, effect, agency. The citation is from James’ Cathartica dictionary entry: “This may possibly have been a particular Preparation of Hellebore corrected, in order to render its Action less violent”.
adarces: salty substance found on plants and used for therapeutic purposes
adynamia: physical weakness
anhidrosis: inability to sweat
ankyloglossia: medical condition of tongue-tie
aromatic: fragrant (the citation is “Aromatic reed”, which is also at the ‘reed’ entry)
conceptus: newly conceived embryo, foetus or fertilised egg
crystalline: relating to crystals
dog-cherry: plant
green: green vegetable (the citation is from the ‘spinach’ entry in James’ dictionary)
metathesis: the movement of diseased matter to a part of the body where it will be less injurious. (This definition is now obsolete. Metathesis these days is more common as a term in linguistics, and means the transposition  of sounds or letters in a word. I occasionally mention it in blog posts, eg here).
morum: tumour or swelling of the eyelid
reed: type of grass (see ‘aromatic’ above)
retorrid: (of humours) dried out or burnt up by excessive heat.
Roman nigella: plant
septenary: the citation refers to a septenary fever ie one that lasts seven days
stasis: stagnation
statice: plant genus
staxis: slight defluxion of any humour, eg nasal haemorrhage
strigment: the dirt and perspiration scraped from the skin with a strigil
strigmentitious: the adjective of above
strike (verb): to pierce, stab
styptic: (of a medicament) that arrests haemorrhage
uvea: membrane of the iris

Robert James is credited in the OED with the literal usage of the phrase ‘hair of the dog’ in his A Treatise on Canine Madness (1760). The application of a hair of the mad dog to the wound was meant to be the cure for the bite, according to James. The phrase has long been used (even before James used it in its literal sense) to mean ‘an alcoholic drink taken to cure a hangover’.

Buster

The suffix -buster is now ubiquitous, and there are thousands of words which end with it, according to a recent article published in the public area of the OED website (here).

 

The first -buster word was gall-buster in 1835. Buster in the early sense meant 'that which busts or destroys'. The OED says that the suffix has been particularly popular and productive (ie new words based on it have been coined) at three distinctive times in the 20th century. The first spike in popularity was in the 1930s, thanks to the popular US radio series Gang Busters. The prefix -buster came to be associated with law-enforcement agencies at this period.

 

The next period which saw a spate of new -buster words was WW2, with words such as dam-busters, bridge-busters and balloon-busters.

 

Then, in 1984 the popularity of the 'blockbuster' Ghostbusters resulted in manufacturers calling their products Dust-busters, Grime-busters and such like.

 

The word 'block-buster' was originally a type of powerful bomb; it then began to describe books, and is particularly used of films these days. It has given rise to another -buster word, chiefly in Britain - a bonkbuster, defined by the OED as "A type of popular novel characterized by frequent explicit sexual encounters between the characters". This word was popularised by the writer Sue Limb in a Guardian column in the 1980s.

New words in the OED March 2012

The OED has just added another batch of words, as it does every quarter. There are around a thousand new entries (which are words which have their own internet page, or are headwords) and many more sub-entries. Among the new headwords are:

arachnodactyly: the condition of having unusually long and slender fingers and hands.
arborio: variety of rice
astroturfing: the practice of falsely suggesting mass support for a policy or product by means of an organised campaign
blood and guts: violence and bloodshed
boofy: blokeish (Australian slang)
businesspeople [first recorded 1821, but with a slightly different meaning then - a people or nation engaged in business]
busy-busy: very busy [first recorded 1900]
date rape (as verb and noun)
designy: characterised by strong or unusual design (frequently depreciative)
East German (and also West German)
femcee: female master of ceremonies
femmy: feminine, effeminate
gasp (as an interjection): used parenthetically to express mock horror etc
geohistory: geological history of the Earth or a region
George Sandism: a lack of regard for conventional female behaviour
historyless: lacking history, or not having a noteworthy past
histrionics: melodramatic or hysterical behaviour, typically intended to attract attention [1931]; showy vocal or instrumental virtuosity [1940]
ludology: the study of games (now especially video games) and game playing.
pussyclaat: a contemptible person (chiefly Jamaican slang)
scratchiti: words or images engraved or etched (illegally) into surfaces in a public place.
soz: slang for 'sorry'
youing: action of addressing a person as 'you' (cf thouing) [first recorded in 1659]

 

There's a new meaning of 'cabbage' -- it's a familiar way of saying and spelling CABG, coronary artery bypass graft.

Time

Time is the most frequently occurring noun in English, according to the Oxford Dictionaries site, and the 55th commonest word in the language. And it keeps growing. The Oxford English Dictionary has been editing the entry for ‘time’ over the last quarter and it has added around forty new ‘time’ phrases. Several of them are a reflection on our busy lives these days; new sub-entries at the main 'time' entry include: time constraint, time management, time pressure (and time pressured), time-sensitive and time-starved. Time-filler has only just gone in to the Dictionary, but time-waster and time-wasting have always been there as entries in their own right. Time-wasting and time-waster date back to the 17th century, although the OED says that the former was “rare before the mid-19th century”.

The fact that a word has only just gone in to the Dictionary does not mean necessarily that it is a new word. The first citation for time-filler is from 1893, and for time-starved from 1894. Time money has only just gone in to the Dictionary, but already it is described as “now rare”; it means “money loaned, or available for loan, for a set period”, and it was first recorded in 1873. Time-warped has gone into the Dictionary for the first time but, not as a sub-entry of the main 'time' entry as the words above, but as a headword in its own right. Its use in science fiction dates back to the 1930s but it was first recorded in print in 1841 (meaning "warped or distorted by the passing of time").

 

The verb 'times' has just been given its own entry in the OED. It has a technical meaning in the building and surveying industries, but another, colloquial, meaning is "to multiply" and many of us will have used the verb well before its entry into the Dictionary (eg "do I times these numbers together?"). The fact that there is a verb 'to times' means that there is also an -ing form, timesing, and this too is a sub-entry at 'times'.

Most popular searches in Cambridge Dictionaries

The most searched-for word in Cambridge Dictionaries Online in 2011 was the word 'dictionary'. CUP has published the top ten words searched for on its site last year. After dictionary, in order, came bear, eat your heart out, lead, concern, lie, issue, despite, appreciate and schedule. (See article here.)

 

People often search for words that are in the news that particular day - tsunami, meltdown, riot, eg. During the phone-hacking scandal there was an increase in the number of searches for "hack" but not as big an increase as in searches for "humble", after Rupert Murdoch faced a Commons Select Committee and said "this is the most humble day of my life". Number 3 in the 2011 Top Ten, eat your heart out, appeared in an episode of Glee, and it is thought that this is why the number of searches for this expression rocketed on May 11th.

 

See the article on CUP's website here.

Dictionary of American Regional English

The fifth volume of the Dictionary of American Regional English, covering words beginning SI to Z, has just been published. It contains regional words from all over America and completes a project that was started at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the 1960s. As well as written words and phrases, regional differences in pronunciation, grammar and syntax are also covered. These were all collected by hundreds of researchers who travelled around the country and recorded the voices of long-term residents. Here's a list of words from all volumes of the dictionary (which I took from a Daily Mail article).

Upscuddle (Southern Appalachian mountains): A noisy quarrel
Feest (New York): Disgusted with/nauseated by
Pinkletink (Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts): A young frog
Rumpelkammer (Michigan): A junk room/closet
Futz (Chicago): To fool around, idle, waste time
Flug (Southern California/Kansas): Dust or lint that collects in pockets
Goozlum (Arizona): A viscous food such as sauce, gravy or pudding
Rantum Scoot (New York, Massachusetts): An outing with no definite destination
On the fritz (The North): Out of order, a state of disrepair or ruin
Strubbly (Pennsylvania German): Unkempt, dishevelled
Zydeco (Louisiana): Dance music in Louisiana Creole

 

Here's the website of the Dictionary of American Regional English with masses of information.

New words in the OED December 2011

As I mentioned in yesterday's post, over a thousand new entries went into the OED in December 2011. The overwhelming majority (but not all) begin with A. They can be viewed, even by people without a subscription to the OED I think, here. As usual, they represent a broad spectrum of register, meaning, and geographical variety of English. They include words fairly new to English, such as chemtrail and va-jay-jay (slang for 'vagina'), plus words that seem new but are older than you might think, such as academy school and 'stitch and bitch'. There are also words of historical interest, such as Adam Tiler (from the 17th century), which is, or was, a pickpocket's accomplice. There are some very old words indeed, such as abecedarium, another word for an alphabet, first used in Old English. There are African words, such as abakwetha (Xhosa traditional ritual) and abacost (man's suit in former Zaire) There are also new meanings of old words; Adam has a third sense now, as another name for the drug ecstasy. There are also old words that have become new parts of speech; accompanied and accomplishing have both been added as adjectives and accordion has gone in as a verb.

 

A lot of sub-entries have gone in too (these are phrases that appear in existing entries), including abdication crisis, abstinence programme, abuse victim, acceptance speech, accident black spot, accident scene, account manager, ace of hearts, ace of spades, administration fee, adrenaline junkie, advertising campaign and very many others.

 

See all new words here. If you have a UK library card you can almost certainly get online access to the main part of the OED via your library's website - look for the Online Reference Shelf or some such wording. Virtually every UK local library authority subscribes on its readers' behalf.

Revisions to the OED December 2011

The revisions to the OED during the last quarter of 2011 mostly related to words beginning with A. Most of the entries had not been revised since the definitions were first written in the 1880s. When modern OED lexicographers set about the task of editing and amending the Dictionary, they decided to start at M, not A, believing that the second half of the Dictionary would be of a more even editorial standard than the first half. By the time they reached Z, they believed, they would be in the swing of the task of revising and so could tackle the more difficult letters.

 

In this A batch OED editors have sometimes changed the order in which the different definitions appear in order to portray the word's historical development more precisely. For the last 120 years, for instance, the first definition of the verb adhere was "To stick fast, to cleave, to become or remain firmly attached, to a substance, as by a glutinous surface, or by grasping, etc". That meaning is the meaning of adhere today. From December 2011 the first definition of adhere in the Dictionary is "To support a person (party, cause) steadfastly; to be an adherent or supporter of. Now rare and arch". This meaning had previously been listed as the second sense of the word. The OED editors have changed the order of definitions to put the first and original meaning of adhere (support a person) first.

 

In the case of the word accurate, the definitions after the revision are still fairly similar to the old definitions, and are in the same order, but definition 2, which in the previous edition was "Of things and persons: Exact, precise, correct, as the result of care", and definition 3, which was "Of things, without special reference to the evidence of care: Exact, precise, correct, nice; in exact conformity to a standard or to truth", have now become since last month "Of a person: careful, precise; tending not to make mistakes or errors; correct" (definition 2) and "Esp. of information, measurements, or predictions: exact, precise; conforming exactly with the truth or with a given standard; free from error" (definition 3). The word accurate derives from the Latin curare, to take care of, and the original editors of the OED, knowing this, felt that there thus had to be a reference to 'care' in all the definitions. Current OED editors feel that it was unnecessary and inaccurate to force a 'care' connection into each definition.

 

The other big task of the last quarter was to revisit all the Spenser citations in the Dictionary, of which there are 6266. When the original writers of the Dictionary in the 1880s wrote the Spenser citations they mostly used an 1869 edition of The Faerie Queene, which contained what were then modern spellings - hyphens were added, for instance, and u in words was replaced by v. Now the citations are taken from the first printings of Spenser's work in the 1590s. So, at the verb 'launch' the previous "A sharpe bore-speare, With which he wont to launch the salvage hart Of many a Lyon ", has been changed to "A sharpe borespeare, With which he wont to launch the saluage hart Of many a Lyon".

 

In addition to the above revisions, there are also well over 1000 new entries, new sub-entries and new senses of existing words that went into the Dictionary last month. I will look at those in tomorrow's post.

New sign language dictionary in Zimbabwe

A new sign language dictionary has been published in Zimbabwe. It has been welcomed by deaf people, as previous sign language dictionaries were often compiled by people who were not deaf, who included signs and gestures that no-one actually used in real life.

 

Zimbabwe has a number of signing dialects so, for instance, the same sign means 'shoe' in Harare, and 'pig' in Bulawayo. The dictionary is designed to end this confusion. Other signs have originally come from other countries' sign languages, and they do not necessarily apply to the Zimbabwean situation. The sign for 'girl', for instance, is a gesture of pulling a long lock of hair, but long hair is rare on Zimbabwean women -- that sign has come from the US.

 

The dictionary has proved popular, and now Lesotho, Mozambique and Botswana are all preparing similar dictionaries.

 

See a BBC article and short video on this story here.

New additions to the OED September 2011

Another batch of new entries – over 1500 of them – went into the OED at the end of September. Some of them – like after-sun, chalkboard, colo(u)r coding, colo(u)r co-ordinating, home delivery, home alone and stitch-up are not necessarily new words – just new to the Dictionary (home alone is first attested in 1885).

The chocolatey desserts popular in the US black bottom, black and white, and blackout cake are new entries. Black is one of the headwords that has been edited this time, so black shoe has also gone in as an entry – black shoes are US surface naval officers (brown shoe – a naval aviator – has gone in too). In a sign of the times, several compounds based on the word ‘terror’ have been added, including terror attack, terror plot, terror suspect and terror threat. The fact that those entries have only just gone into the OED does not mean that they are new phenomena, of course – terror plot was first recorded in print in 1905.

There are already many words relating to Japanese popular culture in the OED, and these have been joined by shonen and shojo, types of manga comics.

One of the way new words are formed is by blending existing words. Examples in this latest OED batch include Britcom, which although seemingly a blend of British and comedy, as on the model of romcom, actually refers specifically to a British situation comedy, so is more like a blend of British and sitcom. Also securocrat, from security, with the –ocrat being an allusion to ‘bureaucrat’. It has two senses - a government functionary who is overly concerned with security (US sense), and a member of the state security apparatus who has become a bureaucrat or wields political influence (South African sense).

Other new entries in the OED are new forms of an existing word, so letter-bomb has entered as a verb and emailed has gone in as an adjective. There are also new senses of existing words, so security now has the computer-related definition “the state of being protected from unauthorized access; freedom from the risk of being intercepted, decoded, tapped, etc.” For reasons of computer security we now have to sign in, sign out, sign on and sign off and these definitions have been added at the phrasal verb entries.

Other new entries are:
kewl: an exaggerated pronunciation of ‘cool’, especially in the language of electronic communications.
ambo: an ambulance; (in Australia) a member of an ambulance crew
frammis: nonsense, jargon (this goes back to the 1940s)
après moi le déluge (also après nous le déluge): used to express complete indifference to what may happen when one is gone.
black swan: something extremely rare

Read more on the public area of the OED site here.