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Showing posts from July, 2014

Word of the month: 'ombre' and a botanical mystery!

A new word of the month to announce that the entries for O/U are now revised and online! To celebrate being finished, here's an account of one word that was a bit problematic. One of the advantages of moving to an entirely online platform for our dictionary is the ability to return to earlier entries and revise them as new texts and new citations come to light. As the editors were preparing the revision of the articles under O- and U-, the following citation taken from a medical receipt proved to be a case in point: Deytre, roine e teine: ombre  de fosse / feltrid / triblés od gresse de pork et gise .xl. jours en pelotes   A-N Med   ii 214 ‘[For] herpes, mange and ringworm: ‘ombre de fosse’, that is feltrike, knead together with pork grease and leave it forty days in balls’ This citation brought to light a number of additions and corrections to the dictionary. Firstly, deytre , a variant of dertre , was unattested in AND2 though it has now been adde...