"jockey", 1632 [published 1637], antedates 1670-; also "masty"

[Jesse Sheidlower]

On Fri, Aug 27, 2010 at 06:13:18PM -0400, Shapiro, Fred wrote:
> There are some still earlier citations for "jockey" in EEBO.
>
> I'm curious about this "interdating" thing: I am familiar
> with the concept, but it seems like it can easily be carried
> too far, particularly nowadays when online resources can
> readily yield lots of citations from targeted time periods.
> Mathematically speaking, aren't 90% or more of all citations
> going to "interdate" the OED, i.e., all citations are
> interdatings unless they happen to have exactly the same
> date as an OED cite? What is the goal -- to have a citation
> for every decade? every year? Surely the OED does not aim to
> have citations as frequent or as voluminous as that, nor
> should anyone expect it to.

It depends on the era, the number of existing quotations, how
good these are, and many other factors. In general, for
well-attested terms that are over a century or two old, small
interdatings (on the order of a few decades or less) are not
high on our list of priorities.

But, for example, a contextual 1830 example that fills a gap
between an 1824 glossarial quote and an 1855 quote, would
likely be useful.

Jesse Sheidlower
OED

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