Into the letter R, with Q in the rear-view mirror

After last quarter's publication of significant words from across the alphabet, we return this month to the steady alphabetical progress through the alphabet which had by last December reached quit shilling. With this quarter's release we cross another boundary, from Q into R, the publication range running from quittal to ramvert.

The following are some of the major entries in the release:

quiz, quotation, quote, R, rabbi, rabbit, rabble, race, racial, rack, racket, radar, radial, radiant, radiate, radiation, radiator, radical, radio, radius, raffle, raft, rag, rage, ragged, rah, raid, rail, railroad, railway, rain, rainbow, raise, rake, rally, ram, ramble, ramp, rampant, rampart

Railway had only three major senses in the previous edition of the dictionary, and it seems that, despite extensive changes in railway systems throughout the world over the past century, the word itself has led a fairly settled existence and no major new basic senses have emerged.

The entry for the word has, however, developed in other ways. In the nineteenth century the English-speaker in Britain was as likely to talk about 'railroads' as 'railways': in fact there are some subsenses of railroad as used in Britain that railway does not carry. Both words are used nowadays in the United States, though often with a nuanced distinction of meaning; preferred usage here and in other English-speaking areas is referred to in the relevant note to the entry for railway.

The revised entry shows major changes in our awareness of the documentary history of the word railway. OED1 regarded the earliest sense ('a wagonway', especially at a colliery) as dating from the late eighteenth century (it was first recorded in an Act of Parliament of George III), with the modern sense regarded as arising around 1812. The revised entry takes the earliest sense back to 1681 and regards OED1's 1812 example of the modern sense as in fact fitting easily into sense 1, leaving 1822 as the first documentary date for the modern railway (tying in with the opening in September 1825 of the Stockton and Darlington line in the UK).

If there are only three major senses for the word railway, the cultural importance of the train over the past century is evident from the mass of compounds into which railway enters (98 in all). The significance of the railway in our lives is suggested by the railway cutting, the railway journey, the railway novel, the railway police, the railway whistle and many more.

Rag takes us back to the poor of previous centuries, and is a good example of a word whose documentation benefits from discoveries in some of the recently available databases. The Proceedings of the Old Bailey have been accessible online now for some time, and these seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century court records are significant witnesses to the vocabulary of the poor at the time. They are relevant in the case of this revised entry in the compounds of rag: rag-box, rag-knife, rag-shop, and the adjectival expressions rag-and-bone and rag-and-bottle.

The documentation of the First Edition of the OED can sometimes give the impression that words were typically coined and used by the literate classes. However, OED1 was on the right lines citing rag-and-bone picker and rag-and-bottle shop from Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor (first published in book form in 1851). But the Old Bailey Proceedings allow us to peek below this, to the responses made in court by those brought in on a charge, or those who gave witness statements. So here we find rag-and-bone picker 49 years earlier, in 1802, and rag-and-bottle shop 29 years earlier than in OED1, in 1822. Rag-knife (listed but unillustrated in OED1) is dated to 1770 in the Proceedings, with rag-box predated from Dorothy Wordsworth (1801) to 1766: "I am a paper-maker, and live at Drayton. The prisoner worked with me a great many years. On the 26th of October I found three hundred pounds of white linen rags..and five rag-knives."

The longest predating from the Proceedings in this set of words belongs to rag shop. OED1 cites it from the slang lexicographer Piers Egan in 1829 (with a second quotation from Mayhew); the Proceedings take the term back to 1674: "And coming two days after to a Rag-Shop, being next Door, he was taken upon Suspicion." As a rule of thumb, any word found by the OED in Mayhew is worth checking in the Old Bailey Proceedings for earlier evidence.

The present range contains words which date from the earliest recorded period of English (radish, rafter, rake (the implement), rain) - illustrating the preoccupations of those days over a thousand years ago - to those from the modern period (which similarly illustrate modern preoccupations, which in this case include racinos or racecourse/casino complexes, rageaholic, ram-raiding, and ragga).

Unofficial figures put the rate at which OED1 senses are antedated in the present release at 58%, with 92% of senses postdated. The figures have been growing steadily since the OED first went online in March 2000, due to a number of factors - the OED's own reading programmes, the increase in the number of searchable databases of historical text now available, and the contributions of the many volunteers who send their findings in to the dictionary.