The Oxford English Dictionary and its chief word detective

3 May 2013 BBC

Oxford English Dictionary Chief Editor John Simpson is to retire after 37 years at the famous reference work. Here he writes of a life hunting for the evidence behind the birth of words.

Historical dictionaries are not just about definitions.
Every word or phrase has a story, and the historical lexicographer has to tease this story out from whatever documentation can be found. That is one of the pleasures of working on the Oxford English Dictionary.
Pom An enduring myth is that the word pom (as in whinging pom and other more colourful expressions) is an acronym from either "Prisoner of His Majesty" or even "Permit of Migration", for the original convicts or settlers who sailed from Britain to Australia.
The first recorded use of pom comes from 1912, which is quite - but not unnaturally - early for an acronym.
There is no historical documentation to support these myths (rather like the disproved theory that posh derives from tickets for the upmarket cabins on the old P&O liners - port out, starboard home). Instead the etymology is apparently more circuitous.

John Simpson was appointed chief editor of the OED in 1993 and will be stepping down later this year

We start with the word immigrant, well-established by the mid 19th Century as a settler. In a joking way people would play with immigrant from around 1850 or so, turning it into a proper name (Jimmy Grant), to give the strange immigrants a pseudo-personality.

Equally playfully, a Jimmy Grant morphed around 1912 into pomegranate and immediately into pom, which it has stuck as till today.

Etaoin shrdlu

Etaoin shrdlu is an expression well known to newspaper compositors and little-known to readers.
It comes from the same stable as Anthony Burgess's Homage to Qwert Yuiop. Qwertyuiop is what you find on a computer screen (or, in the old days, on a typewriter) if you run your fingers along the top row of letters on a keyboard.
Etaoin shrdlu is the equivalent sequence of letters that an old-style Linotype printing machine operator would have put out by running his (or her) finger down the first two (leftmost) columns of Linotype keys.
But etaoin shrdlu had a purpose. The Linotype operator would hit these keys intentionally to signal that an error had been made and the preceding line should be removed from the type before it was printed.

Sometimes the type-setters and proofreaders were asleep and missed this alarm bell.
The OED finds its first reference to this practice in 1931, but Linotype machines were used for many years before this.
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