When I use a word . . . Lexicographic anniversaries in 2025

Abstract

Like people, words have birthdays. My definition of the birthday of a word is the year in which it first appeared in a written text, as, for example, documented in the Oxford English Dictionary ( OED ). Of course, many words have had a spoken life before their written one, but I count that as the fetal stage in their development. Their appearance in the world is marked by their first appearance in print, their birthday or anniversary. In some cases the date on the birth certificate, i.e. the earliest recorded date in the dictionary, can be antedated by finding earlier examples of the use of the word in print; in my experience, this happens to about 10% of biomedical words. Counting anniversaries as having occurred in multiples of 50 years, I have searched for biomedical words whose birthdays fell in years ending in ’25 and ’75 and have found 655 of them, about 46 per 1000 new words of all kinds in those years. Among these, I discuss: “body sin,” dating from 1175 and largely obsolete since then, only once, more recently, being used to describe obesity; “licorice,” which dates from at least 1275, but perhaps earlier; and “spittle-evil” a synonym for leprosy, which dates from 1225. The last of these occurs in a 13th century manual of instruction for anchoresses, The Ancrene Riwle , in which God’s grace and the Devil’s work are both likened to the use of medicinal compounds, respectively beneficial and harmful. Indeed, the words medicine, remedy, and remission all occur for the first time in writing in this text. My last example is “pharmacological,” which celebrates its 200th anniversary this year. I have been listing medical anniversaries annually since 2016, and have recently done so for 2025.1 For this purpose I have counted an anniversary …