Half-orphan

[Laurence Horn]

At 2:50 PM -0400 6/7/05, Benjamin Zimmer wrote:
>On Tue, 7 Jun 2005 14:34:32 -0400, Benjamin Zimmer
><bgzimmer at RCI.RUTGERS.EDU> wrote:
>
>>It is indeed a curious oversight, considering that the databases have
>>numerous attestations back to the mid-19th century. Here's the earliest
>>from APS:
>>
>>-----
>>_The Friend_, Feb. 3, 1838, p. 143, col. 3
>>First Annual Report of the [New York] Association for the Benefit of
>>Coloured Orphans.
>>...
>>The number of orphans has been gradually increased, and the managers now
>>have it in their power to congratulate their benefactors on having
>>extended their fostering care to twenty-nine destitute children. Several
>>of this number are half-orphans, who have been admitted on the same terms
>>required in the Half-Orphan Asylum.
>>-----
>
>And the participial adjective "half-orphaned" goes back even earlier:
>
>-----
>http://digital.lib.ucdavis.edu/projects/bwrp/Works/SmitCBeach.htm
>Charlotte [Turner] Smith, "The Truant Dove, From Pilpay"
>in _Beachy Head: With Other Poems_ (London, 1807)
>
>Then to her cold and widow'd bed she crept,
>Clasp'd her half-orphan'd young, and wept!
>-----
Couldn't the absence of "half-orphan" and "half-orphaned" from
dictionaries be attributable largely to the productivity of the
formation process and transparency of its results?  I wouldn't expect
"half-eaten" to get its own entry, for example, or "two-buttoned".

Larry