Thursday, September 1, 2011

In other words

I started thinking about how nice it would be to have one's writing cited in the OED. So, at a whim, I decided to see how many words used Raymond Chandler quotations to illustrate. Turns out there's a lot; 435 citations in fact. So I also checked to see how many words for which Raymond Chandler was the first quotation. Not so many, but still a respectable figure: eight. Of course, this doesn't mean these are the absolute earliest usages or that he coined them, merely that it was the earliest found when looking for examples.

hot rod
itty-bitty
ju-ju
mesc
prettied
private eye
stooge
torcher

After the jump are the first page of words from the OED. It was 100, but apparently there was another R. Chandler in the 18th century who wrote travel books.

bite
bitty
blat
bomb-proof
borax
borrowed
Borsalino
bug-eyed
build-up
Burgundy
century
chaise-longue
chalk
cheat
cheater
check
cheese
chew
chin
chiv(e)
circulation
clam
cleaner
cocoa
come-on
cook
cop
cover-up
demi-verge
dictating
dilly
dinge
doohickey
drift
drum-majorette
dummy
egg-head | egghead
fag
finger
fink (noun)
fink (verb)
flash
foot
free
freeloader
frequency
front
full
gay
gimlet
glove
go
goon
grief
grift
gun (noun)
gun (verb)
half-
ham
have
hay
heap
heat
hell
hit
hiya
hole
hoop

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