Back in May 2020, OED launched its latest in a long line of crowdsourcing initiatives, asking members of the public to seek out earlier evidence for entries in the alphabetical range M-R. This was significant as although it focused on a part of the alphabet that we had updated in the early 2000s, we knew that databases that we now use routinely didn’t really exist back then and were likely to prove extremely fruitful sources of quotation evidence.

For example:

• mendacity: antedated from 1646 to 1540 using EEBO; likewise moonbeam (to 1535 from 1600), multiplication table (1657 from 1662)

• masonic: antedated from 1786 to 1761 using ECCO; likewise moonlit (to 1783 from 1817) 

• menopause: antedated from 1872 to 1858 using Google Books; likewise melodramatically (to 1820 from 1836) 

• meanie: antedated from 1927 to 1902 using NewspaperArchive; likewise mellophone (to 1901 from 1913) 
• mom: antedated from 1894 to 1846 using newspaper databases on ProQuest.

This is where you come in. As editors are concentrating on updating the unrevised text of the OED, it is unlikely that they will be able to go back systematically over the revised ranges for some time. We’d therefore like to invite you to try your hand at antedating any word, phrase, or sense that has been revised or added in the range M-R, and to submit your findings using this form.

Useful sources of information include:

• Early English Books Online (EEBO)
• Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO)
• Google Books
• Any substantial historical newspaper database that features facsimiles of original pages (there are many suppliers of these, including Gale, NewspaperArchive, ProQuest, and Trove)
  

Some of these databases are freely available; others may be available to you through membership of an institution such as a library or university. 

You can also join the conversation on X (formerly known as Twitter) with the hashtag #oedantedatings. 

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