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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?"
...in case of Slashdotting.
The Army reading list
Are they saying morph was not used until 1993? morph
I think we're looking at words here that were first used in science fiction, and then moved into more general use.
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
"Morph" was a clay-mation character who appeared on UK kids tv from 1978 onwards. He was animated by Aardman Animations (who later went on to make "Wallace and Gromit" and "Chicken Run") and appeared on shows with Tony Hart (recently interviewed by b3ta)
without much work, i found an *ancient* use of the word morph, as a verb.
google groups
of course, these may very well not match OED definitions of a good citation, but i would think you could then compare to other sources, like news papers and magazines.
it is exciting (being both a computer and language/words geek) to see such a project, though. it will surely keep the pressure on the OED to modernize and improve, as well as to accept other kinds of citations.
stored on computers from birth to the grave
The Morph Files was early Aardman animation, with clay characters that could easily, well, morph from one shape to another as the story required. The first production is from 1980.
to the Aardman site
I'm pretty sure the term avatar (for VR) predates 1990.
My first memory of the term "Avatar" being used to represent an online persona was on the online service Q-Link aka Quantum Link, a nationwide BBS system for the popular Commodore 64. (The parent company later became AOL.) They had a 2D graphics chat world called "Club Caribe" which I remember using the term "Avatar". (At the time, I thought it was a bit odd, since I was used to the term Avatar being used for the main character of Ultima IV (1985).) This would have been around 1988-1989 or so, which is earlier than the OED citation, although I do not have a printed source backup for this. (Check a C-64 magazine of that time period? Old copies of Compute Gazette, anyone?)
I've found a post from a MUD-Dev mailing list discussion thread held in 2001 on the same topic (what's the earliest use of the term avatar) that supports this recollection, and adds to it that the term might have been used by the predecessor of Club Caribe, Lucasfilm's Habitat (1984-1988), or possibly even earlier by Jaron Lanier. Again, no paper-based backup on this.
Regarding the term "morph", 1993 doesn't sound too far off; it might be a year or two earlier though. I ran across the term in late 1993 when trying to replicate the morphing process used by Michael Jackson's "Black or White" music video for a computer graphics class (based on a white paper by Pacific Data Images). Both that video and Terminator 2: Judgement Day which used morphing came out in 1992. The CG morphing technique was known as morphing when I took the class in 1993. I'm not sure the PDI white paper used the term morphing though, so maybe the term's name caught on some time after the video came out. So it might be 1993, but I wouldn't be surprised if the term was used in 1992.
--LP
Avatar shows up in Roger Zelazny's "Lord of Light" in 1967. It's used in the PR (physical reality, heh!) sense of changing bodies at whim.
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is not a "typical" dictionary, for those of you who are not familiar with it.
I noticed several people mentioning concerns about the use of words prior to some of the dates mentioned and also about non-print use of words. The thing is, the OED attempts to define words as they have been used in printed literature. In other words, without the Star-Trek script that illustrates the use of the term "cloaking device", they cannot verify it and date it properly.
The thinking, if I am not mistaken, is based on the idea that a word in published print has gone through an editing process. The editor is then responsible for making sure that the words used in the final publication are valid and used accurately. The OED attempts to catalog any new words or new uses of existing words that appear after having gone through this process. The assumption being that any new words or new uses of words are now "valid" as a result of having been printed.
Whether you agree with this process is probably not relevant; but that is the way that I understand it to work.
If you would like more information you should read the book "The Professor and The Madman" by Simon Winchester. It's a great story that details how the OED came to be; and Mr. Winchester is a fine autor.
The first use of 'avatar' in Sci-fi that I know of is Poul Anderson's 1978 novel The Avatar, ISBN: 0722111312
The usage was not strictly VR in the sense we know it today, but awfully close.
Probably because that's the standard for the Oxford English Dictionary, as started by the Victorians.
The original project was not simply (hah) to collect every word in usage in the English language, but to trace the evolution of meaning of each single word from its first recorded use on paper to its current day usage. A vast team of volunteers and paid members produced and selected quotations from verifiable documents that illustrated the changing meaning of every single word throughout its recorded existance.
The Dictionary in OED is somewhat of an understatement. But then, we talk not merely of the English, but of the Victorian English.
Actually, the idea of an artificial being who's form resembles a human goes all the way back to the ancient greeks. Not too suprising then that someone came up with the word android in 1727....
Submitting Science Fiction Citations to the OED:
So, unless you have a physical copy - e.g. a game manual, story booklet, etc. - OED won't accept it.
The 30's and 40's is when the science fiction magazines got started, and most of the authors whose works are considered "the classics" of science fiction got their start with those mags.
So they are the very definition of pedantic, big deal. Just show them one of the novelizations by James Blish or Alan Dean Foster (for the animated ones) that came out a couple of years later.
-Dave
That's because the character was an avatar in the traditional sense of the word; the plot of Ultima IV was the character's quest to become an embodiment and exemplar of the 8 virtues. It has nothing to do with the word "avatar" in the VR sense, which is the usage that is being discussed here.
avatar
n.
2. An embodiment, as of a quality or concept; an archetype: the very avatar of cunning.
The embodiment of anything, actually.
The notion of human-shaped machines goes a lot further back than that - right back to Greek mythology. But such things were considered magic and/or supernatural: only with the Industrial Revolution did it become possible to think of machines that were manufactured, which is about the right date for a 1727 citation.
Even at that, robots remained nasty dangerous things-Man-wasn't-intended-to-know (cf Frankenstein) until the 20th Century, when writers like Capek created/popularized the concept (and the word, too: depends on who you ask), and Asimov depicted them as tools, designed for a purpose by engineers.
...laura, still a fan of Susan Calvin
>>Somebody at Stanford has done research into the word 'morph'. It came into widespread use with the debut of Michael Jackson's Black or White video of 1991. I wrote the software for that video at PDI (Pacific Data Images) in 1990, and presented it at Siggraph in 1992.
Maybe in the US. Here in the UK, a generation of kids grew up with Morph - he was a shape-shifting plasticine stop-motion animated character created in 1980. In fact, Morph was the very first creation of Aardman Animations, who went on to produce Wallace & Grommit and Chicken Run. Learn (slightly) more at http://www.aardman.com/showcase/amazing.html.
The author of this post asserts his moral rights.
"In the beginning there was modelling clay. And from the clay came forth Morph a 6" high terracotta person with the ability to 'morph' into inumerable forms but who mostly stayed true to his original human-like form. Morph lived in a wooden artbox on the desk of tv artist and presenter Tony Hart and originally appeared in Tony's BBC art series Take Hart..."
I've got firsthand info from the man cited in the 5th paragraph (David Griffin) as to the validity of the OSS Software being used for both the OS and the DB. He is my co-worker and friend before that, and is not lying about his use of OSS. Furthermore, this is one of the few sites that's been slashdotted without being brought to it's knees, so that's got to say something?? :)
/. ... Apparently the server is doing just fine; processor load is a bit high but it's reponsive.
Apparently, Dave received word from the site owner (his friend is the cited editor of the OED) about his 5 minutes of fame on
This is my Sig.
from Wiki : ...GI was originally an abbreviation for Galvanized Iron, a US army clerks' term for items such as trash cans (which are galvanized), but later the abbreviation transformed to stand for "Government Issue"--all articles issued in conformity with US military regulations or procedures. Still later the abbreviation transformed to refer to US soldiers themselves
Grok is already in the online OED with a range of citations, starting with Heinlein in 1961. So there's no need for it to be included in this project.
Such as golems (from jewish folklore) and homunculi (people built by alchemists).
In the UK at least every small child knew the world "Morph" back in the 1970's. Morph was a plasticine animation who would indeed turn into other things.
I've no idea where the "morph" of sci-fi came from but perhaps too much BBC childrens TV ?
(http://mag.awn.com/index.php?article_no=1438)
The notion of human-shaped machines goes a lot further back than that - right back to Greek mythology. But such things were considered magic and/or supernatural: only with the Industrial Revolution did it become possible to think of machines that were manufactured, which is about the right date for a 1727 citation
Also, even Capek's usage of the term "robot" isn't really our usage -- the "robots" of Capek's RUR were artifical (but still biological) humans, much like the replicants of Blade Runner.
Science fiction, under whatever name, goes back centuries. Cyrano de Bergerac wrote a story about a rocketship to the moon in 1657!
I think the crucial thing that happened in the 30s is that the English-speaking world started to be dominated by an industrial, rather than an agricultural, economy. As the population became more technical, so did its taste in adventure stories.
"Morphing" was introduced to Hollywood in 1988's Willow (for petrification special effects). (Search on that page for "ILM")
It was a magic-spell effect... therefore it should be considered related to Gary Gygax's use of the "polymorph" spell in 1974's Dungeons and Dragons.