[Corpora-List] the ebb and flow of inclusion of words in OED?

[chris brew]

I think  part of the 1600 bump must correspond to William Shakespeare
(1564-1616, first folio published 1623, second folio published 1632)
and that a corresponding bump from 1380-1400 corresponds to Chaucer (you
have to set the granularity to 10 years to see it clearly)

Something else happened in the 1650-1659 decade. I have a plausible
hypothesis but no more. James Blount published a dictionary:
*
*
*Glossographia; or, a dictionary interpreting the hard words of whatsoever
language, now used in our refined English tongue* (1656)

and there are a fair number of OED entries that reference it, but I haven't
run the stats to verify whether this is the reason for
the bump.


On Mon, Apr 25, 2011 at 2:34 PM, Ted Pedersen <tpederse at d.umn.edu> wrote:

> Greetings all,
>
> I was recently browsing through OED and discovered their timeline
> feature. This shows a histogram that represents the number of words
> added to English during 10, 50, or 100 year ranges, and I was a little
> surprised by the shape. I think you can see this graph at the URL
> below (assuming you have online access to OED).
>
> http://www.oed.com/timelines
>
> My verbal description won't be great, but there are local peaks around
> the years 1400, 1600, and 1900, with valleys around 1500, 1750, and
> the present day...while the overall trend is to have more and more
> words included in the language, this graph suggests there are periods
> where many words are included, and others where there are much fewer
> included, and that this tends to alternate. The valley around 1750 is
> quite dramatic as compared to the peaks of 1600 and 1850, for example.
>
> What's going on here? Does this tell us something about English, or
> about how OED was compiled, or ... ?
>
> Thanks!
> Ted
> --
> Ted Pedersen
> http://www.d.umn.edu/~tpederse
>
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