When I use a word . . . Antedatings in the Oxford English Dictionary

An antedating, lexicographically speaking, is an earlier instance of the use of a word in a text than had previously been recorded. When James Murray spoke to the Philological Society in 1884 about the difficulties in compiling the Oxford English Dictionary, he supposed that about three quarters of the earliest citations in the dictionary would eventually be antedated. However, he was doing himself and his colleagues a disservice. My own, admittedly inadequate, efforts at antedating biomedical words in the dictionary have yielded on average antedatings to the tune of about 10%. And one cannot always be sure that an apparent antedating is genuine; in some cases different meanings and misspellings make interpretation difficult.