Maritime History Citations for the OED

Alan H. Hartley

From William Bourne's Almanacke and Prognostication for three yeares (1571)
 

I would like to thank the editorial staff of the Oxford English Dictionary of Oxford University Press for their permission to make these citations from the Historical Reading Programme available to the public. Please bear in mind that this material is in the preliminary form in which I have submitted it to the editors and that it might not be used in the present form, or at all, in the third edition of the OED which is at present being prepared.

Divinity School, Bodleian Library, Oxford

I want also to thank Information Services of the University of Minnesota at Duluth for providing the facilities of their World Wide Web server for these files.

Please send any comments or questions to Alan Hartley at ahartley@d.umn.edu, or go to my home page.
 

Table of Contents
  • Explanations
  • Medieval Sources (about 39 KBytes)
  • Sandahl's Middle English Sea Terms, v. 1-2 (about 59 KBytes)
  • Sandahl's Middle English Sea Terms, v. 3 (about 39 KBytes)
  • Fudge's Cargoes, Embargoes... These are the first slips I have submitted electronically, through the good offices of Jeffery Triggs of the North American Reading Program of the OED. This more direct method will supplant the present method of submission on paper.
  • Fifteenth, Sixteenth & Seventeenth Century Sources (about 121 KB)
  • Timoteo O'Scanlan's 1831Diccionario marítimo español(about 220 KB)
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    Explanations

    The OED has almost since its inception relied heavily on citations contributed by interested readers. Until recently, the citations were submitted exclusively as 4" by 6" paper slips, but those familiar with the Web now have the option of submitting their citations electronically through the OED Quotation Submission Form. Your contributions in either form will be greatly appreciated.

    I have been reading maritime and related history for the OED since May 1995 and am now able, thanks to the cooperation of Oxford University Press and the University of Minnesota at Duluth, to make a selection of my slips available on the Web. My aim is two-fold: to provide some small insight into the prodigious amount of detailed work required to produce a new edition of the greatest of all historical dictionaries of English, and to make available in the interval before publication some of the historically and lexicographically interesting data from my reading. (The citations are predominantly of maritime terms, but there are also many from the general vocabulary.)

    The organization of entries in the present file is rudimentary: I have grouped them chronologically, and I hope that most readers will have access to browsers, such as Netscape Navigator, which permit simple searches. (The chronological arrangement is disrupted occasionally by citations from other periods usually made in following up an item cited from the source under study. ) This collection should for now be considered a resource through which the curious will browse almost randomly.

    The slips were prepared originally in MS Word 6.0.1 for Macintosh, saved in MS Rich Text Format and converted to HTML using the program rtftohtml for Mac. (Note that word-processing software now (1997) available eliminates the need for an external program to accomplish this conversion.)

    Each "slip" consists of a headword in bold type followed, where necessary, by a reference to the appropriate section of the existing entry in the second edition of the OED. (A number following the headword or the abbreviation for the part of speech immediately (i.e., without a space) represents the OED's superscript which is used to distinguish senses.) Then follows the reason the citation was made: "antedates" if the quoted example is earlier than the earliest recorded in OED2; "def." or "etym." if the example provides material which will materially alter the existing definition or etymology; "not in OED" if I was unable to find it in OED2; "new meaning" or "new var." if the example provides a meaning not adduced in OED2 or an unrecorded, orthographically significant variant. The next paragraph contains the date of the example and the bibliographic reference, and the next, the quotation cited. Finally comes a translation ("trans:"), if necessary, and any comments by the reader ("note:").

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