What came first

HOW OLD DO you think the word "hydrant" is? Or "hobo"? Or "jamboree"? If you've never stopped to wonder when a particular word was first used in print, you shouldn't feel guilty - most people don't.

For those who did wonder, there was always the Oxford English Dictionary, the acknowledged fount of information about the early life of words, its entries originally built from millions of citation slips collected by hand over decades. But now there's a dedicated cadre of DIY word-researchers who don't want to wait for the OED's revision process to get around to updating the words they're interested in. These researchers scour the Internet and new electronic databases of old magazines, newspapers, and books to find the earliest uses of a word for themselves. Pushing back the date of the first recorded use of a word is called "antedating," and it's become something of a competitive sport.

The main playing field for competitive antedaters is the e-mail list of the American Dialect Society (americandialect.org): that's where researchers post their new finds for the record (which also serve as challenges for others to beat). Antedaters take especial delight in finding uses earlier than those shown in the OED (and in knowing their work will be picked up on by Oxford editors). Since August, the list has seen the antedating of "hydrant" pushed back to 1801 from 1828, "hobo" to September 1888 (from only a month later), and "jamboree" (meaning "a large party") to 1858, back from 1861.

So "hobo" was used a month earlier than we thought it was - what's the big deal? It's like working out your genealogy back to the time of William the Conqueror only to find you were descended from a long line of absolute nobodies.

Not every at-bat results in a home run, and not every antedating shakes our knowledge of a word's character, but some do. Pushing back the date of first known use of a word can change our understanding of where it came from, and from whom. Barry Popik, a former Manhattan traffic court judge who now lives in Texas, holds the world heavyweight belt in significant antedatings. By finding an example of Chicago being called the "Windy City" dating from 1860, he disproved the popular legend that Chicago's "Windy City" nickname was coined by New York Sun editor Charles A. Dana, pooh-poohing Chicago's ability to put on the 1893 Columbian Exposition. In his hometown of New York, Popik (along with Gerald Cohen, a professor at the University of Missouri-Rolla) also managed to disprove half a dozen competing explanations for the nickname "The Big Apple" by finding evidence for it being used by New York Morning Telegraph columnist John F. Fitz Gerald in the 1920s. Popik also put to rest the story that the term "hot dog" was invented by New York Evening Journal cartoonist Thomas Aloysius Dorgan ("TAD"), finding a use in the Knoxville Journal dating to 1893, almost a decade before TAD started working at the Journal.

Proving old stories wrong isn't the only allure of antedating. Some antedatings give us a more well-rounded picture of a word. "Ms.," as a title used for women independent of their marital status, has been widely regarded as a product of the 1970s feminist movement. But Ben Zimmer, editor for American Dictionaries at Oxford University Press, found a 1901 newspaper citation suggesting it as "a word to be used in place of 'Miss' or 'Mrs.,' when the addresser is ignorant of the state of the person addressed." Grant Barrett, editor of the online Double-Tongued Dictionary, managed to date the term "political football" back to at least 1826 - well before American football, as we know it today, was played. The earliest political footballs were more likely to be kicked around than thrown.

Sometimes the antedaters know more about a word's history than its own coiner: Zimmer also found that "heavy metal" was first used in 1970, a year earlier than its coiner, Mike Saunders, remembered. (This also means that the band Humble Pie has the honor of being the first to have its music described as "heavy metal," instead of the even-more-obscure Sir Lord Baltimore.)

As with most world records, any particular word's antedating can be a fragile thing. As more and more of the world's libraries become digitized, older and rarer newspapers, magazines, and books become searchable, and words are discovered to be years, and even decades, older than we supposed.

Readers bored with crossword puzzles and Scrabble, and who want to get in on the antedating action, should choose a few words and a couple of databases and start poking around. (Friendly librarians are happy to help those who have trouble mastering search interfaces.) Searchers should take care, though, that typos introduced in the scanning process don't lead to mistaken antedatings - more than one new find has turned out to be a case of a 9 being mistaken for an 8 by some imperfect optical character recognition. However tempting, though, new antedaters should leave the word "jazz" alone - New York University librarian George A. Thompson Jr. holds the antedating prize on that one, with an April 2, 1912 citation from the Los Angeles Times - where it was used to talk about baseball, not music.

Erin McKean was the editor in chief of the New Oxford American Dictionary, Second Edition, and blogs about dictionaries at DictionaryEvangelist.com. Jan Freeman is on vacation.

(Correction: Because of a reporting error, the column "What Came First" in the Ideas section on Oct. 14 misidentified the person who found the earliest known use of the term "Windy City" for Chicago. It was Fred Shapiro.)