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> > >Ian Lancashire's work on early modern lexicography has also done >much to challenge the view that Shakespeare was continually coining >new words. If Shakespeare were as neoteric as the OED would have us >believe, he would not have been understood by the groundlings. The >OED does seem to have a bias in allocating first instances of words >and senses to big name authors. I wonder if that might be in part because the original lexicographers had to rely on memory and paper rather than databases, thus making it likelier that they would refer to "big name authors" rather than an obscure pamphlet from 1522 or 1564? I mean, we have tools at our disposal that, obviously, they did not, making it a great deal easier to trace linguistic origins. pch >John Leonard