[Ads-l] Fw: Substantial Antedating of "Hopefully" as a Sentence Adverb

[Shapiro, Fred]

Actually, when I used an online search to find an 1851 use of sentence-adverbial "hopefully," I had already for some years been using online historical databases to discover antedatings.  My first computer-assisted antedating was found in 1978, and was, I believe, the earliest use of a large searchable historical database for linguistic research.

Fred Shapiro

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From: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU> on behalf of Shapiro, Fred <00001ac016895344-dmarc-request at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
Sent: Friday, May 22, 2026 6:08 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
Subject: Substantial Antedating of "Hopefully" as a Sentence Adverb

The OED's first use for the word "hopefully," used (very controversially) as a sentence adverb, is dated 1932.  Many decades ago I published an article in the journal American Speech pushing sentence-adverbial "hopefully" back to 1851.  This was one of the earliest computer-assisted word antedatings.  A few years thereafter, I asserted in another American Speech article that Cotton Mather had used sentence-adverb "hopefully" in 1702.  Later, I was convinced by others that the Mather use was not really sentence-adverbial.

I now notice a spectacularly early discovery of this usage discussed on the Merriam-Webster website.  Here it is:

This Discourse hath fully approved itself unto the Judgement of all those that have seen it hitherto, and hopefully it would have wrought some effect upon those that mannage the Affairs of this State, if the Danger of this last Commotion, had not employed all their strength and Attention, to save us from sudden Shipwreck.
—Samuel Hartlib, A Further Discoverie of the Office of Publick Address for Accomodations, 1648

I don't know how long ago Merriam-Webster came upon the Hartlib passage, or whether M-W picked it up from some previous discussion.

Fred Shapiro

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