OED Science Fiction Database Updated

solferino writes "The Oxford English dictionary commenced a project back in 2001 (Slashdot report) to solicit reader citations of the earliest uses of science fiction words. The most recent OED newsletter covers the progress of the project, which has its own site hosted on a FreeBSD box running a MySQL database engine. An interesting graph on the site shows date of word origin by decade. Surprisingly recent words featured on the site are /avatar/ (1990 - in the VR sense) and /morph/ (1993) - unless the Slashdot readership can report earlier uses?"

Comments

Re:well....

[some_schmuck]

Yah, and I don't think I'd qualify "persay" as a word, per se.

Missing words

[drsmack1]

I searched for but could not find:

Bite my shiny metal ass

its full of stars

Spock, why does your underwear have three legs?

I don't think that this project is complete yet.

Morph's historic appeareance in SF

[rafael_es_son]

Everyone knows the word Morph's first use in science fiction can be traced back to Lord Albiron's 1929 novel "Danger, Danger High voltage." Quoting from the 3rd edition (Bantam), p. 33, 3rd paragraph :

"Blast it Timmy!, that durn George Bush specimen has morphed into some kind dumb ass nucular monkey. They must be running some kind of avatar process on him."

I'll never forget the first time i read that.

Re:Morph's historic appeareance in SF

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it was actually used before that, in the 1913 novel "Mods on crack."
To wit:
"Through the hallucinogenic effect of avatars on the moderators, less than witty joke posts morphed into insightful ones."

Serious omission!

[Dystopian Rebel]

What is the earliest usage of the verb "to slashdot"?

Re:What about Grok?

[Cerpicio]

Wow.

And do you get beat up on daily basis, too?

I mean, I read the book and know the term, but I have never used it. I always thought it was rather odd seeing someone else use it outside of the book.

-- C.