A Kentish man, Mr Spencer Jones, sends me a photograph of a street named ‘The Forstal’. It is a cul-de-sac, or dead end, as we say in Oxfordshire.
Why, asks Mr Jones, is this perfectly ordinary word not in the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary? The answer would be that it is dialect. There are lots of words not in the OED — slang, jargon, personal names, place-names and dialect words. Some of each category, though, do get in.
Forstal is in Joseph Wright’s Dialect Dictionary. The earliest citation it gives (although Wright could not use as wide a catch as James Murray at the OED) is an interesting one from Aylesford Parish Register for 1661: ‘Henry Gorham and John Allen …going into the river at Jermans fforstall to wash themselves … were both drowned.’ (The ff is a scribal convention for a capital F; the writing of proper names such as Fiennes with an initial ff is misconceived.)
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