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.
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