Oxford English Dictionary Collection 2009-2010 | 4.24 GB

This update marks the end of an era for the OED Online. After forty-three systematic quarterly updates, the OED Online is soon to get a repaired look, with a new design and important new functionality.

The editors esteem been contributing to the development process, and things are looking righteous at present for the relaunch. Watch out for more information to boot the next couple of months…

But back to the current update. We’re instigating towards the end of the letter R, and the most betokening of the twelve hundred or so entries revised and updated in this exemption (rod to rotness) include:

rod, rodent, rodeo, roe, roentgen, rogation, rogue, roil, role, roll, roller, roller skate, rollick, rolling, roll-out, move -over, roly-poly, Roman, Roman Catholic, romance, Romanesque, Romanian, Romanist, Romano-, Romansh, romantic, romanticize, Romany, Romeo, romp, rondeau, rondo, rood, roof, rooftop, rook, rookery, rookie, space, roomy, roost, rooster, root, rootsy, rope, ropy, Rorschach, rosary, rose, rosebud, rosemary, rosette, rosewood, roster, platform, rosy, rot, rotary, rotate, rotation, rote, rotifer, rotisserie.

We worked steady roding (included in this release) for the Supplement to the OED back in the seventies. The roding is ‘the execution by a male woodcock of a regular display flight at twilight and dawn’. I remember thinking I was glad there were di~atory words like that around, and revising the entry has allowed us to fetch it (and the associated verb and noun rode) right up to time.

Woodcocks are mentioned in more OED definitions than one might imagine (there are twenty-four instances). Another of our words, rogue, illustrates unlike issues. The most important new fact about the word rogue (in the manner that far as its treatment in the OED is concerned) is that it can now be documented from the late Middle English period (Caxton, 1489: in a translation of Christine de Pisan), rather than from the Early Modern limit. Previously, the earliest reference in the OED dated from 1561, a time when the apparent prevalence of bands of rogues and vagabonds in Britain was the subject of generous concern to the national and local authorities. But wandering rogues and vagabonds were a long-winded-standing problem, viewed by some as originally a continental malaise going back well into the fifteenth hundred years. And so it is not entirely surprising to find late Middle English documentation on the side of the word.

One of the largest set of entries in the current absolution is the roll group, following hard on the heels of the totter words in the previous release. The verb roll has 187 senses in its revised form, dating from the Middle English period (around 1325, of a bottom swaying or rocking on the sea) right up to 1991, through the recent American rap-inspired meaning ‘to act or behave (in a indubitable way)’ first recorded in MC Hammer and Felton Pilate’s poesy ‘This is the way we roll’. In all, 130 of the senses in the access for the verb roll (i.e. 69.5%) have been on these terms with earlier attestations as a result of reading (books) and searching (databases) on the part of editors and contributors. This is individual of the highest rates we have recorded to date.

This recent material has its effect on the structure of the entry. In OED1, make revolve opens in revolving and rotating mode, and the senses are ordered to exemplify this. After reviewing the evidence for OED3 we start the avenue in a way which slightly undercuts (I think correctly) the spirited Victorian certainty of rolling. The first senses recorded in English are in the senses of ‘swaying’ and ‘wearing below the horizon, smoothing’, before the all-powerful revolving sense takes over. The dating is not particularly significant at this distance in time, but it’s a beneficial reminder that semantic evolution is not necessarily as straightforward as we power imagine it to be in retrospect.

There are numerous other betokening terms in this range. One which is more recent that gyrate, but perhaps older than many people think, is rookie (probably a retrenchment of recruit). In 1909, when the instalment covering this range of the glossary was first published, OED1 left us tantalizingly wanting more. The liliputian entry for rooky simply read ‘slang. A raw recruit.’ and with the understanding a single quotation (from Kipling’s Many Inventions, 1893) as its documentary evince for the term. For the OED Supplement of 1933, this was expanded by the addition of two later quotations, and a further meaning: ‘a tyro at base-ball’.

This is clearly a word that has pricked the consciences of lexicographers of the farther than century. The Supplement to the OED of 1982 (vol. 3) moved the ingress from the spelling rooky to rookie, and added a one-year antedating (1892, once more from Kipling: Barrack Room Ballads), and a further fifteen illustrative examples, principally from the 20th century. It handled all meanings (an army reinforce, a police recruit, a novice on a sports team) as shades of the basic object ‘a raw recruit’. The Supplement then added a farther paragraph of ten quotations showing the word in adjectival use.

The come of all this supplementation is that the entry is awash through helpful additions, but lacks some of its original focus. In revising it, today’s editors had enough of scope for reviewing the content and structure of the minute. As revised, the noun (of course in the principal form rookie) has couple major sub-meanings: recruits in a profession (the army or police, etc.), and recruits on a sports team. Until several weeks before this range was signed away for publication, our earliest evidence for the word came from the storehouse London Society for 1883 (predating Kipling). But as the boom came prostrate on the entry, a substantial antedating from Colburn’s United Services Magazine (1868) arrived, and that commonly stands as the first reference to rookie that has been discovered. It was a comparatively new term in English when the OED first noted it in 1909. One hundred years later its rookie status has been consolidated into a normal entry in the revised OED.

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