Antedating of "geology"

Fred Shapiro fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU
Thu Aug 8 15:09:24 UTC 2002


On Thu, 8 Aug 2002, Jesse Sheidlower wrote:

> OED gives sense 1 as "The science which treats of the earth
> in general", labelled obsolete, and distinguished from sense
> 2, which deals with the investigation of the earth's crust
> etc. This is the specific sense Fred was antedating.

For some words the distinction between the modern sense and a more general
older sense is an extremely fine line.  I have never tried to antedate the
modern sense of "anthropology" because I can't figure out how to
distinguish it from the older, more general sense in the OED.

Fred Shapiro


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