September 2006

Talking about Words: Dead Words

By Richard Bailey

Many of us who like English have an intense curiosity about new words. There is an annual contest for "Word of the Year" and dictionaries of new words are constantly being published.

Far less interest is expressed in words that have died, partly because no one can be quite sure when a word is really dead.

Words that are obsolete or obsolescent have been revived by poets and fiction writers who discovered "perfectly good words" and put them back into currency. So, for instance, take the wonderful old word whilom "formerly." It appears in the earliest surviving texts written in English but then diminishes in frequency and range of use. Shakespeare never used it, but his close contemporary, Edmund Spenser, did. After Spenser, whilom pretty much vanished.

Spenser loved archaic words like whilom, and he even made up archaic-looking ones that had never been heard before—like halfen "half." Edgar Allen Poe did too: litten "lighted" (as in "red-litten windows"). These words are zombies, the living dead.

Dictionaries themselves play a role in resuscitating words. As the great Oxford English Dictionary appeared in parts (from 1884—1928), the poet and novelist Thomas Hardy saw it as a wonderful source for "new" poetic words. In 1919, he used the word embowment in this line: "O for...Light to gaily See thy daily Iris-hued embowment!"

What can his readers have imagined this word to mean? (Presuming they were not thrown off the track by the split infinitive.) The only place they could have discovered it was in the OED in a quotation of 1623: it means the vaulting of a roof or the sky. When the supplement to the dictionary was published in the 1970s, the editor—Robert Burchfield—instructed readers (probably reluctantly): "delete Obsolete rare -1 ." (That superscripted one in OED labels means that there was only one example known to the editors. Thanks to Hardy, though, there were now two.)

Embowment, still-born in 1623, rose from the grave in 1919. But not for long. A Google search (undertaken in August 2006) produced just one example of the meaning "vaulting," a poem by an Australian author with a deep interest in Hardy.

Perhaps embowment might seem to be a word on life support. The OED can't even tell if the core syllable rhymes with rain bow or bow down.

Certainly Hardy's embowment is a vivid example of the observer effect: watching a phenomenon contaminates the observation.

You can help keep embowment alive by using it in a sentence. Then it won't die.

Like old soldiers (in the song revived by Gene Autry sixty years ago), words never die: they just fade away. But they don't vanish.

Dictionaries keep them alive.

Richard W. Bailey is the Fred Newton Scott Collegiate Professor of English. His most recent book is Rogue Scholar: The Sinister Life and Celebrated Death of Edward H. Rulloff, University of Michigan Press, 2003—a biography of an American thief, impostor, murderer and would-be philologist who lived from 1821 to 1871. It was published by the University of Michigan Press in 2003.