Have you ever had trouble conveying the immediacy of history? Well, maybe not immediate now, but the idea that history used to be somebody's today. A neat little tool you can use to show how people's ordinary lives changed at a moment in time is to look at what new words came into the English language in that particular year. Every year, there is a newspaper story about new words added to the dictionary, and now you can look back through history at the words that were first "spotted" by the Oxford English Dictionary in any year.
First, log in to the Oxford English Dictionary database: Click here, then enter your library card number when prompted. At the bottom left of the screen, click on the Advanced Search button. In the first search box, enter the year you want to search, then select "first cited date" in the box next to it. Click Start Search, and your list will appear.
Here are some words that were first spotted in 1776!
agricultural
charade
colonial
derange
ear-trumpet
funding
Hobbesian
inadmissible
jungle
Mason-Dixon
phlogisticate
pitch-fork
resurrectionist
rough-riding
velveteen
Wow (first spotted 1513), what a cross-section of history those words are!
First, log in to the Oxford English Dictionary database: Click here, then enter your library card number when prompted. At the bottom left of the screen, click on the Advanced Search button. In the first search box, enter the year you want to search, then select "first cited date" in the box next to it. Click Start Search, and your list will appear.
Here are some words that were first spotted in 1776!
agricultural
charade
colonial
derange
ear-trumpet
funding
Hobbesian
inadmissible
jungle
Mason-Dixon
phlogisticate
pitch-fork
resurrectionist
rough-riding
velveteen
Wow (first spotted 1513), what a cross-section of history those words are!
