29 October 2018

English language time machine

Merriam-Webster has reconfigured their database so that you can now look up all the words that were invented (or recorded) in any given year.  I found the following words were invented the year I was born:
anabolic steroid
audiology
bite-size
buzzword
Caesar salad
cafe au lait spot
cardiac catheterization
circuitry
clinical trial
crawl space
crown molding
decubitus ulcer
dental technician
deoxyribonuclease
digital computer
expiration date...
- and on an on for several hundred entries.  Try their Time Traveler.  The database sorts the words year-by-year back through the 1500s, and by centuries for entries with origins older than that.

2 comments:

  1. When a new word first appears in print, it typically has been around for some time already - sometimes decades.

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