Moot Court (1788?)

[Jesse Sheidlower]

On Sun, Oct 27, 2002 at 10:59:26PM -0500, Bapopik at AOL.COM wrote:

> OED's entry is dreadful.  The first entry is allegedly by
>Thomas Jefferson from 1788, but it's cited from a book
>published about 70 years later.  The Library of Congress's
>American Memory database has a large volume of Jefferson's
>work online now.  There are _no_ "moot court" hits on that
>database!

So, all that means is that the cite we have is from a work
not in the American Memory database.

> OED's next citation is 1899--111 years later!  Obviously,
>they're working on this.  What do they have?

The revised entry for _moot_ will be appearing in the December
update. However, I don't think it will be too drastically
changed. When a word appears as a compound of this sort, we
usually wouldn't give more than a cite or two per century.
If it had sufficient complexities we'd upgrade the compound
to a headword, but that doesn't seem to be the case here.

A pre-1788 cite would be welcomed, though.

Jesse Sheidlower
OED