"Virtuous circle"

[Fred Shapiro]

On Mon, 1 Nov 1999, Paul McFedries wrote:

> "Virtuous circle" caught quite a while ago. Lexis-Nexis reports over 600
> citations in 1999 alone. The earliest Lexis-Nexis citation is from The
> New York Times' Information Bank Abstracts, which offers the following
> abstract from August 27, 1972:

For a linguistically oriented list, there's not a whole lot of checking of
the OED that goes on here.  The OED has "virtuous circle" from 1953.  I
find it even earlier through JSTOR:

1933 _Mind_ 42: 177  Our definition is thus a circle; not however a
vicious but rather a virtuous circle.


Fred R. Shapiro                             Coeditor (with Jane Garry)
Associate Librarian for Public Services     TRIAL AND ERROR: AN OXFORD
  and Lecturer in Legal Research            ANTHOLOGY OF LEGAL STORIES
Yale Law School                             Oxford University Press, 1998
e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu               ISBN 0-19-509547-2