Game Theory

[Fred Shapiro]

On Sun, 8 Apr 2001, James A. Landau wrote:

> A quick count of the terms beginning in "a" shows 17 whose citations come
> from the OED and 56 whose citations do not.  There are no terms from
> Merriam-Webster beginning with "a" although there are some beginning with
> other letters.  I think your "pretty derivative" is an unfair description.

I hadn't looked at this site for a while, and it appears to have improved,
due in part to contributions by James Landau.  Jeff Miller seems to have
realized that Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary is not the prime
source for English word-datings, as he obviously thought when he begun the
site.  Still, I looked at A - anallagmatic, and of the 15 entries in that
range dealing with English-language terms significant enough to be covered
by the OED, 12 of the web site entries were derived from the OED.

It would be interesting to see how many of the entries would be improved
upon by searching JSTOR, which is pretty strong for late-19th-century and
20th-century mathematics.

Fred Shapiro


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Fred R. Shapiro                             Editor
Associate Librarian for Public Services     YALE DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS
  and Lecturer in Legal Research            Yale University Press,
Yale Law School                             forthcoming
e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu               http://quotationdictionary.com
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