Can You Figure Out When the Word First Appeared in Print?

As any true word nerd will tell you, it can be difficult to pin down when certain words and phrases first entered the pubic lexicon. You might think unfriend, for example, came about in a post-Facebook society, but it actually first appeared in 1659, when one despondent fellow wrote to another: “I Hope, Sir, that we are not mutually Un-friended by this Difference which hath happened betwixt us.”

See if you can determine when these words first appeared in print, per the Oxford English Dictionary, in the quiz below.

If dating words seems like a daunting task, it was. The first edition of the OED was the product of more than 70 years of lexicographers combing through texts to create reliable citations of their earliest uses in print. (They thought it would take 10 years to make the dictionary, but it actually took them 27 years just to make it to ant.)

Some volunteer contributors devoted years to the task. Dr. William Minor, for example, was one of the dictionary’s most valued contributors, sending in thousands of entries.

“I never gave a thought to who Minor might be,” OED editor Dr. James Murray once said. “I thought he was either a practicing medical man of literary tastes with a good deal of leisure, or perhaps a retired medical man or surgeon who had no other work.”

Murray was mostly right—Minor did have plenty of time on his hands. He was an American surgeon and paranoid schizophrenic imprisoned in an English psychiatric facility for murder.

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