Reading the OED’s Dating Conventions Properly: a1400, c1500, and the Dagger

Most people who consult the Oxford English Dictionary read it the way they read any dictionary: they find the word, glean the meaning, and leave. But the OED is not really a dictionary of meanings; it is a dictionary of evidence, a record of when and how words have been used in writing across more than a thousand years. Its most valuable information is often carried not in the definitions but in a scatter of small marks around the dates — a lower-case letter, a question mark, a little dagger — that most readers skim straight past. Learn to read them, and a bare date turns into a carefully hedged argument about the past.

Dates are claims, not facts

The first thing to understand is that a date in the OED is not a birthday. The dictionary cannot tell you when a word was coined; it can only tell you the earliest use its editors have so far found in surviving writing. That is a different and more modest claim. Words are spoken long before they are written, and most writing has been lost. So every date is really shorthand for ‘the earliest instance we can currently document’, and the marks that surround it exist to signal exactly how firm — or how shaky — that documentation is.

‘a’ and ‘c’: before and about

The two commonest signals are the prefixes a and c, borrowed from Latin. An a stands for ante, ‘before’: the notation a1400 means the citation cannot be dated exactly but is known to fall before 1400. This most often happens when the author’s death is the only fixed point — a text by a writer who died in 1400 must have been written at some earlier, unknown moment, so it is filed as a1400. A c stands for circa, ‘about’: c1500 means ‘around 1500’, a date estimated rather than pinned, usually because the text can be placed only within a rough window. The OED’s own guidance is blunt about the reason:

Dates may be prefixed by a (ante, ‘before’) or c (circa, ‘about’) to show that the first or last recorded citation cannot be dated more accurately.

So a1400 and c1400 are not two ways of writing the same thing. The first says ‘no later than 1400’; the second says ‘somewhere near 1400, give or take’. The letter is doing precise work.

The question mark: doubt on top of doubt

When even that is too confident, the OED reaches for the question mark. A form such as ?a1400 means ‘probably before 1400, but we are not sure even of that’; ?c1450 means ‘about 1450, and treat the estimate with suspicion’. The question mark is doubt layered on doubt — an admission that the manuscript, the attribution, or the estimate itself is contested. Far from a weakness, it is the dictionary being scrupulous, refusing to launder a guess into a fact. The OED has, over its history, tidied its own older habits into this system: vague forms such as ’14..’ were converted to a1500, and a bare ‘?1500’ to c1500, so that the level of uncertainty is stated in a single consistent grammar.

OE, eOE, lOE: dating the undatable

For the oldest layer of English, numbers give out altogether, and the dictionary switches to period labels. Anything from the Old English era is marked OE rather than given a year, because the surviving manuscripts usually cannot support a precise date. The current edition refines this further: eOE marks early Old English and lOE late Old English, dividing the pre-1150 material into broad bands — roughly early (before about 950), core, and late (about 1100 to 1150) — anchored, as far as possible, to the dates of the manuscripts themselves. When you see OE where you expected a year, it is not an omission. It is the dictionary declining to invent a precision it does not have.

The dagger: a small cross for a dead word

The most poignant mark is the obelus, or dagger — † — placed before a word or before a particular sense. It means obsolete: this word, or this meaning of it, has passed out of use. A single entry may carry live senses and dead ones side by side, each obsolete sense flagged with its own dagger, so that the entry becomes a kind of family plot in which some members are still living and others are marked as gone. Reading the daggers tells you not just what a word means now but which of its former lives have ended.

Why the dates keep moving

There is one more thing the conventions quietly admit: no date in the OED is final. The dictionary is being revised continuously, and the single most common kind of revision is antedating — the discovery of an earlier example than the one previously on record. Every time a scholar turns up a word in a manuscript or an early printed book older than the dictionary’s current first citation, that word’s date is pushed back. The digitisation of vast archives of old text has accelerated this enormously, and first-recorded dates that stood for a century are now routinely overturned. This is why the marks matter so much. They are not decoration; they are the dictionary’s way of saying, in its own compressed grammar, exactly how provisional each claim is, so that when a better piece of evidence arrives the record can absorb it without embarrassment. A date under a question mark is a date already braced for revision. The honest reader holds every date lightly, as the best current answer rather than the last word.

Reading an entry properly

A worked example shows how much the marks carry. Suppose an entry offers a sense glossed as obsolete, marked with a dagger, whose first quotation is dated ?a1400 and whose last is dated c1600. Unpacked, that terse line says: this meaning is dead; the earliest surviving instance appears in a text we believe was written some time before 1400, though we are not certain even of that; and the latest instance we have found sits around 1600. From four characters and a small cross you can reconstruct a sense’s entire lifespan and the confidence the editors place in each end of it. Read carelessly, it is just a pair of numbers. Read properly, it is a biography.

Put the marks together and an OED entry starts to read like a legal document, every clause hedged to exactly the strength the evidence allows. A sense first attested at ?a1400 and marked with a dagger is telling you a complete little story: this meaning appears in a text we believe was written before 1400 though we cannot be certain; it enjoyed a period of use; and it is now dead. None of that is in the definition. All of it is in the punctuation. The discipline the dictionary asks of its readers is the same one it imposes on itself — to say no more than the evidence supports, and to mark the difference between what is known, what is estimated, and what is merely suspected. Once you can read those marks, you are no longer looking up words. You are reading the history of the language in its own careful shorthand.