Wednesday, August 7, 2013

Twenty-first-century OED slips

Bryan Garner posted two photographs — one, two — of the paper slips used by lexicographers at work on the Oxford English Dictionary. In other words, they still use paper slips.

Re: the second photograph: extra credit if you can decipher the word without reading the whole slip. (I couldn’t).

You can see slips from the early days of the OED here.

comments: 4

Sean said...

Quite the loopy "r" in that person's handwriting. Unpacking my immediate reactions: "-gnaik" ...maybe a Greek stem? "kaon" alt. for koan?
Well no, of course. Ahh, antiquark—which, I think, still leaves a little room for Zen.

I bet you've already read The Professor and the Madman?

Michael Leddy said...

I thought -gnaik too.

I have a copy (somewhere), but a book I’m closer to is Caught in the Web of Words, by K.M. Elisabeth Murray, James Murray’s granddaughter.

Anonymous said...

Aunty Quark quixotic spins
Quarkotic is Quick Aunty.

Michael Leddy said...

Thanks for the wordplay, Anon.