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unusual facts about OED



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Charles Talbut Onions

On completion of the OED, the universities of Oxford, Leeds, and Birmingham conferred honorary degrees upon him.

Cowbell

Grimm's Deutsches Wörterbuch s.v. "Kuhschelle" points to a 1410 mention in a Frankfurt archive; the OED lists 1440 as the earliest attestation of a bell-wether, the leading sheep of a flock, on whose neck a bell is hung.

Daoism–Taoism romanization issue

The OED records the first usage of gung-ho in 1942 (referring to Evans Carlson's Marines) and of kung-fu in 1966 (referring to Bruce Lee's movies).

Delfin Carbonell Basset

The New Dictionary of Current Sayings and Proverbs, Spanish and English Foreword by John Simpson, Editor in Chief, OED (Serbal, 2005)

Dirigisme

In English it is also dirigism and both spellings are used by the OED.

Fornication

1300; the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) records a figurative use as well: "The forsaking of God for idols".

Gas Mark

The term "gas mark" was a subject of the joint BBC/OED TV series Balderdash & Piffle, in May 2005, which sought to establish the history of the term.

Gnome

Similarly, gnomes are contrasted to elves, as in William Cullen Bryant's Little People of the Snow (1877), which has "let us have a tale of elves that ride by night, with jingling reins, or gnomes of the mine" (cited after OED).

Hogshead

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) notes that the hogshead was first standardized by an act of Parliament in 1423, though the standards continued to vary by locality and content.

Nihon Kokugo Daijiten

Shogakukan has compared its Nikkoku dictionary to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) because the Nikkoku represents the largest and most thorough dictionary of the Japanese language, and also provides etymologies and historical citations for its entries.

Ogive

Villard de Honnecourt, a 13th-century itinerant master-builder from the Picardy in the north of France, was the first writer to use the word ogive. The OED considers the French term's origin obscure; it might come from the Late Latin obviata, the feminine perfect passive participle of obviare, to resist, i.e. the arches resisting the downward force of the structure's mass.

Omnism

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) quotes as the term's earliest usage the 1839 long poem "Festus" by English poet Philip J. Bailey: "I am an omnist, and believe in all religions".

The Orange Peels

Joining them were multi-instrumentalist Oed Ronne and drummer Peter Anderson, both from The Ocean Blue.

William Chester Minor

It was probably through his correspondence with the London booksellers that he heard of the call for volunteers from what was to become the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).


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