Uncovering the first printed use of a word is known as “antedating” and has been central to dictionary efforts since the first edition of the OED. If you’re intrigued by the topic or just appreciate historical esoterica, I highly recommend the book The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester- it’s a great quick read.

The Online Etymology Dictionary is good for word histories as well:

https://www.etymonline.com/

Flipping through random years is more fun than I would have thought. 1629 was the year "April fool" was first used.

Oliver Cromwell swore revenge on everyone that fateful day.

I was surprised to see "baked" in 1975, but it turned out to be just a specific definition.

Ludwig von Mises uses autistic in an unusual manner in the section heading Autistic Exchange and Interpersonal Exchange of his book Human Action, published in 1949. It would be interesting to see the context of the first known reference of the adjective autistic from 1942 to better understand von Mises' choice of the word in his context, but I can't seem to find more information other than the first use year.

I had the opportunity recently to look up autistic in an old dictionary (early 20th century), and it was not present.

I think these are organized by the first time they appeared in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, not when they were first used. A word is typically in use for years before entering the dictionary.

It used to be a "thing" on some news shows to comment on what words had entered the new edition of the dictionary for that year, and I recall thinking "wow, I've been using that for years" many times.

> When was a word first used in print? You may be surprised! Enter a date below to see the words first recorded on that year.

Webster was born in 1758, and George Merriam was born in 1803, yet many of the entries are from before they were born.

This. It says that "cosmic background radiation" dates to 1975, which is weird because that's 10 years after it was discovered. The Google ngram viewer shows it entering the literature in 1953.

MW still doesn't have the computing definition of "semaphore", but it lists only the railway one. Shouldn't we be using Wikipedia altogether?

When you consider dictionaries, they often focus on mainstream published sources. Programming is a specialized field and "semaphore" in the multi-threading sense has not entered into common usage, so it would be unlikely to be present in the corpus that they're working with. You could argue that dictionaries should cover every argot, but that requires resources and people who specialize in those fields. Programmers would be better served with a specialized dictionary,[0] especially since your average Joe isn't usually going to see it being used outside of the specialized field.

[0]: And we do have those. For example: http://foldoc.org/semaphore. HN might especially be interested in the Jargon file: http://catb.org/jargon/html/.

I suppose there is a little irony that semaphore doesn’t have multiple definitions to MW.

Wasn't 'burner phone' used throughout The Wire, so must have been in print before 2008 (the show's last season).

First urban dictionary entry was 2006

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Burner%20pho...

In November 2006 a class action suit (http://www.lbtaxrefund.com/) referred to a "prepay or burner phone service" in the court filing.

'burner' was known lingo in law enforcement as early as 1998.

The example for selfie references a pornographic subbreddit. Did not expect to see that on a dictionary website.

Is there any API for this data? I couldn't find it any, sadly.

The same data is offered on DictionaryAPI.com as the Collegiate Doctionary https://www.dictionaryapi.com/products/api-collegiate-dictio...

It is surprisingly difficult to get definition by word access to bulk data.

A long time ago I got a hold of every comment on HN and Reddit thanks to some kind data scientist floating around here and wanted to do a ‘word frequency by topic’ analysis but I needed to be able to define basic English before I tackled domain specific lingo like “Miss Fortune” in the “League of Legends” subreddit and slang.

Ended up giving up because I couldn’t find any remotely comprehensive lists of defined English words. There are some out there but they pail in scope to the numbers being advertised by the notable English dictionaries.

Go to 1913, click "blackout," click more information... says first use was 1824. Click "black light," not invented until 1935. Maybe I'm missing something?

Noun in 1913, verb in 1824.

So when was "Time Traveler" used for the first time?

1894. The main character of H.G. Wells' "The Time Machine" was simply referred to as "The Time Traveller".

(Source http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/292042 -- may be pay walled)

Ha! For my first guess, I randomly picked year 1762, and that year was the first known use of 'entrepreneur': https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/entrepreneur

So I looked up "venture capitalist", which redirected me to "venture capital", which has a first known use in 1943.

"digital" doesn't have a specific year, M-W just says "15th century", but the first known use wasn't for 'fingers', it did originally have to do with calculation: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/digital

"computer" is 1613, in the form of "one who computes": https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/computer

And, just as important, "coffee" is 1598: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/coffee

Unfortunately doesn't work if you search "Time Traveler"

It’s cool but why don’t they let you search for a word?

yeah that's actually what I hoped this was. It's cool nontheless, but I'd like to be able to search for words like "computer" "keyboard" etc.

Just search the actual dictionary for the word, no need for a special page.

oh thanks! I probably should just have tried looking around on the page there :)

Because a dictionary is something to asymptotically nears completeness and languages only get expanded with new words for new concepts. The bulk of the increase is in the long dead past, then it slows down until finally only a small trickle of new words are added every year.

The standards of inclusion for nelogisms are often high.[0] For older terms, you usually only need a few attestations.[1] It also highly depends on what corpora the dictionaries are using, since the past set can include the surviving written word, while the more modern words would require wading through the firehose of the internet, unless that term also starts being used in print publications.

[0]: If I had to guess why, because dictionaries don't want to seem like they're trying too hard to be trendy by including every new slang term, instead of the most popular, and it's also hard to foresee whether any of the words will even have staying power in a year since a lot of it can be short-lived.

[1]: Sometimes only one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hapax_legomenon

isn't that an artifact from how new words are found: it takes time?