Reading the OED’s Dating Conventions: A Reference Guide

The Oxford English Dictionary is a dictionary built on historical principles, which means every sense is illustrated by dated quotations arranged from earliest to latest. To read it well you have to read its dates well — and the OED’s dating is a compact code of its own, full of small letters and symbols that carry precise meanings. This reference guide explains that code so that an entry’s chronology can be read as the editors intend, rather than guessed at.

The logic behind the dates

Because the OED orders senses by the date of their earliest evidence, the first quotation in a sense is not decorative; it is the load-bearing fact. It states the earliest point at which the editors have found the word or sense actually used. Everything downstream — the ordering of senses, claims about which meaning came first — rests on those opening dates. Reading them accurately is therefore the difference between understanding an entry and misreading it.

Two cautions apply before any of the symbols. First, a first-quotation date is the earliest the editors have found, not necessarily the earliest that exists; revision routinely pushes these dates back. Second, the date attaches to the quotation, and the quotation’s own date can be uncertain — which is exactly what the symbols below exist to signal.

Dating a single quotation

The most important conventions govern how a single citation is dated when the evidence is imperfect.

• c. — an abbreviation of Latin circa, ‘about’. A date given as c1400 means the source is dated to approximately 1400. It signals genuine approximation, not precision.
• a. — an abbreviation of Latin ante, ‘before’. A date such as a1616 means the quotation must date from before 1616. This is used constantly for authors whose exact date of composition is unknown but whose date of death caps it — Shakespeare’s works are routinely cited as a1616, the year he died.
• ? — a query, marking a date the editors regard as doubtful. It may combine with the others: ?a1500 means ‘probably before 1500, but uncertain’, and ?c1450 means ‘perhaps about 1450’. The question mark is the OED’s honest flag for ‘we are not sure’.

Read together, these let a single date carry a surprising amount of nuance. ?a1425 is a very different claim from a flat 1425: the first says ‘a source we think predates 1425, though we are not certain’; the second asserts a firm year.

Dating the Old English period

For the earliest English, the OED abandons numeric years, which are often unrecoverable, in favour of period labels.

• OE — Old English. This is the default label for material from before about 1150, when a precise year cannot be assigned.
• eOE — early Old English, used for forms occurring only in manuscripts from before about 950.
• lOE — late Old English, used for forms occurring only in manuscripts after about 1100.

These labels behave, in the chronological ordering of an entry, as dates: an OE quotation sits before a c1200 one. When you see them at the head of an entry, you are being told the word reaches back into the earliest recorded English, beyond the reach of exact years.

Symbols attached to headwords and senses

Beyond the dates themselves, a small set of symbols qualifies the words and senses they date.

• † (the dagger, or obelus) — placed before a headword or sense to mark it as obsolete, meaning it has dropped out of use. The dagger is a statement about the word’s survival, not about the reliability of its dating.
• Superscript numbers — small raised figures distinguish homographs, so that bear the animal and bear the verb are kept apart as separate numbered entries.
• Spelling in quotations — historical quotations are reproduced in their original spelling. An unfamiliar or ‘wrong-looking’ spelling in an early citation is not an error; it is the record of how the word was actually written at the time.

Reading a first date correctly

Putting the pieces together, consider what an entry is really claiming when its earliest quotation reads, say, ?a1500. It is not saying the word was coined in 1500. It is saying: the earliest use the editors have located comes from a source they believe predates 1500, though that dating is itself uncertain. The word may be older; the true first use may be lost; and a future antedating may replace this citation entirely. The OED’s dating code is designed precisely to keep all of that visible rather than flattening it into a single confident number.

Every OED date answers a narrow question — ‘what is the earliest use we have found, and how sure are we of its date?’ — and never the broader one, ‘when did this word begin?’

How an entry is put together

The dating conventions make most sense once the architecture of an entry is clear. A typical OED entry opens with the headword and its pronunciation, followed by grammatical information and, in square brackets or a dedicated section, the etymology — the account of the word’s descent from earlier languages, which is a separate matter from the dated quotations that follow. Then come the senses, each numbered, each defined, and each illustrated by a chronological run of quotations from the earliest the editors have found to a recent one.

Within that structure, the dates you are reading almost always belong to the quotations, not to the word in the abstract. When an entry appears to say a sense ‘dates from’ a given year, it is really saying that the earliest quotation the editors could supply for that sense carries that date. Keeping this in mind prevents the commonest confusion of all — mistaking the date of a piece of surviving evidence for the date a meaning came into being.

Labels that qualify a word or sense

Alongside the dating symbols, the OED uses compact labels that shade the status of a word or sense, and they interact with the dating in useful ways.

• Obs. (‘obsolete’) marks a word or sense no longer in use, the written counterpart of the dagger. Its last quotation effectively dates the point beyond which the editors found no further evidence of use.
• rare flags a word or sense for which evidence is scanty, a caution that the dating rests on very few citations.
• arch. (‘archaic’) and Now hist. (‘now historical’) distinguish words that survive only in deliberately old-fashioned use from those used only when discussing the past.

These labels are reminders that a date never stands alone. A single early quotation followed by a gap and then a label of rare tells a very different story from an unbroken run of citations across the centuries, even if both entries open with the same year.

Why author dates and quotation dates differ

The a. convention repays a closer look, because it exposes a real subtlety. Much early literature cannot be dated to the year of its composition; what can often be fixed is the date of the author’s death, after which they clearly wrote nothing. The OED therefore dates such quotations with a. plus the death year — a1616 for Shakespeare, for instance — meaning ‘written at some point before this, by an author who died in this year’. The date is thus a ceiling on the evidence, not a claim that the words were written in that exact year. Read this way, an a. date is a piece of careful reasoning compressed into two characters, and misreading it as a plain year quietly discards that reasoning.

Common misreadings to avoid

Several mistakes recur among readers new to the dictionary. Treating the first-quotation date as the date of coinage is the commonest: the two are related but not the same, and the gap can be large. Reading a1616 as ‘in 1616’ inverts its meaning; it means ‘before’. Ignoring the query in ?c1450 converts a hedged guess into a false certainty. And ‘correcting’ the spelling of an old quotation destroys the very evidence the quotation exists to preserve.

A final habit worth cultivating is to notice what an entry does not claim. The OED is scrupulous about the limits of its evidence; where a word’s ultimate origin is unknown, the etymology section will say so plainly rather than invent a source. The dating conventions serve the same honesty at the level of the individual citation, letting the reader see not only what is known but how firmly it is known.

Quick reference

With this code in hand, an OED entry stops being a wall of cryptic abbreviations and becomes what it was always meant to be: a precise, honest map of what is known about a word’s life, complete with a clear marking of everywhere the ground is uncertain.