[Ads-l] Not in the OED -- perhaps with good reason

Daphne Preston-Kendal dpk at NONCEWORD.ORG
Thu May 5 09:01:27 UTC 2022


On 5 May 2022, at 10:47, Daphne Preston-Kendal <dpk at nonceword.org> wrote:

> Checking my usual sources, Franklin Veaux’s polyamory glossary added the variant ‘trouple’ in 2012 — it’s in this copy from June 2012 but not the previous WayBack Machine copy from May:
> <https://web.archive.org/web/20120618000329/http://www.morethantwo.com:80/polyglossary.html>
> 
> A search shows up this 2012 NY Mag article with ‘throuple’ itself:
> <https://nymag.com/news/features/sex/2012/benny-morecock-throuple/>


Here’s a very early (but isolated) example in a BITNET post from 1994:
<https://groups.google.com/g/bit.listserv.uus-l/c/9aXug6v9u8g/m/1N1-CMCxbzcJ>

And another isolated usage from 1997 (apparently just meaning ‘three’):
<https://groups.google.com/g/alt.tv.red-dwarf/c/VJSUJynNbpg/m/lc0E6h-s2icJ>

But Google Groups has nothing more for "throuple" until 2014. Searching for "throuples" (plural) causes an error for me when trying to go past page 2 (2017). "trouple" has too much apparently-irrelevant noise for me to traipse through.

-- 
dpk (Daphne Preston-Kendal) ·· 12107 Berlin, Germany ·· http://dpk.io/
  He made the Legislature meet at one-horse tank-towns out in the
  alfalfa belt, so that hardly nobody could get there and most of the
  leaders would stay home and let him go to work and do things as he
  pleased.  — H. L. Mencken, ‘Declaration of Independence in American’

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