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

War stimulates the imagination?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just a bizarre peak around 1940's.

Bombs falling, V2 rockets, mad dash for jet fighters... not surprising the entire culture is leaping into the future.

Scary shit, actually.

Re:War stimulates the imagination?

[john82]

That is a good observation and perhaps not bizarre at all. I think it might be even more basic to say that "war stimulates technology" and that, as a consequence, "war stimulates vocabulary." This is because new technologies generate their own terms of art, buzzwords, and jargon. Think of all the words and phrases that were coined to describe each aspect of those technologies that you identified -- launch pad, blast shield, telemetry, sound barrier, ejection seat, etc.

Although one might say they're actually acronyms, these are also examples of "war stimulates vocabulary":

radar
fubar
snafu
jeep (from GP for "general purpose")
GI (Govt Issue)

well....

[SisyphusShrugged]

I wouldnt classify avatar and morph as "science fiction" words persay. Rather it might be more logical to classify them as "scientific" or "technological", because they are not just used in fiction but rather in everyday speech to refer to real things...

Re:well....

[kalidasa]

More precisely, they're looking for first *science-fiction* uses of words whose *science-fiction* uses have since migrated to general use. Otherwise they would not have included "avatar," which has a more general meaning in Sanskrit that was borrowed into English before it developed its non-mythological uses.

Re:well....

[Erratio]

This project and conversation needs refinement. Both of those words are not only part of standard vocabulary, their meanings haven't been changed. Actually citing a first date for their use is slightly absurd, since they're just pre-existing terms which have become somewhat standard in a specific new field. A brief history of significant usage would be more accurate (not only inside Sci-Fi but also related to it). A short description of the chain which led the words from their original contexts to their Sci-Fi ones. "Avatar" for instance was aroudn in earlier video games (like Ultima), and I'd wager was used in pen and paper RPG's before that, all of which wuold have led to it's entry into Sci-Fi. "Case" is a computer term but it would be pointlessly foolish to cite the first time someone used it in that context.

Not to mention...

[Anonymous Coward]

Nukes, rubber substitutes, better explosives,...

Nothing like a world war to stimulate the imagination.

Religion...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wasn't one of the functions of religion to explain scientific systems and phenomena? Weren't the stories of Gods on Olympus essentially science fiction for the audiences of the time? The observable forces of nature, as best understood at the time, duking it out for entertainment and fantasy purposes, but also closely tied with what was a more-or-less best-guess of scientific principals.

My question-- where do you draw the line between "science fiction" and mythology/religion?

Re:Religion...

[prgrmr]

My question-- where do you draw the line between "science fiction" and mythology/religion?

By determining the focus and intent of the stories. Those using religion to explain and/or using the explanations to promote religion are clearly not science fiction.

A more general point to ponder is that the key word is "science", not "fiction".

Re:Religion...

[prgrmr]

And the word science is completely contextual as well .. look at how much "science" of today would have been dismissed as "fiction" 100 years ago.

Hardly any. String theory perhaps. Maybe superconductors, although most scientist in 1904 were equiped with the basics to be able to be brought to an understanding about it. Heck, the fabled "fifth state of matter", the bose-einstein condensate was postulated 80 years ago. 550 years ago Da Vinci was drawing helicopters!

The mythology of the Greeks and Romans was in part their science of their day. *That* was the point of the original poster.

It was a poor point when he made it and it is still a poor point backed with a poor example when you make it.

paper?

[potaz]

A lot of the dates seem awfully late. For instance, for "cloaking device" they list 1996(!) and 1981 editions of books, while mentioning that, oh hey, Star Trek may have used the phrase "cloaking device" in the sixties, but we'd need to see the script to verify.

I don't understand: why does a usage have to be on paper to count for this project?

Unnecessary Details

[NorthWoodsman]

Is it really necessary to mention it's running MySQL and FreeBSD? I know this is a tech site, but geez; who cares how the database works, it's completely irrelevant to the article.

Re:Avatar from Ultima games

[Unnngh!]

I don't think that's the same usage...rather, it's an oblique reference to the incarnation of a god in human form. The game prophecies that the avatar would continually return to rescue the world from peril.

Superb book about the history of the OED

[ctid]

I received for Christmas, "The Meaning of Everything", by Simon Winchester. This gives a very interesting and compelling account of the genesis of the dictionary, some of the very strange characters who contributed and the process by which entries are constructed. A very interesting read.

Morph is Greek! Avatar is Sanscrit.

[rufusdufus]

The word "Morph" is Greek. Claiming it is a recently invented science fiction term is ludicrous. As is the word "Avatar", which is a sanskrit word for the embodiement of Vishnu.

It took me two seconds to find this information on dictionary.com. It baffles me how a site claiming to be affiliated to the OED could make such errors.

Re:Morph is Greek! Avatar is Sanscrit.

[kalidasa]

1. Morph is not greek, morphos is. 2. They're looking specifically for the sf uses of those words, not the first occurrence of the word with any definition. The way the OED works is that it tries to find the earliest printed occurrences of each definition of a word. "Avatar" in the sense of "a representative face/person/attribute of a god," the Sanskrit meaning, is different from the sf sense of "an electronic representation of a person which is not visually mimetic" or however you want to define these: so the OED would want the first *English* use of the first meaning (probably in the 18th or 19th century, whenever Sanskrit studies was just starting out) and the first English use of the second meaning (probably when the first muds and moos came out, 70s or 80s).

Re:Morph

[Thagg]

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.

Interestingly, ILM was pushing hard for the alternative 'morf' spelling, and we spent considerable effort seeding our preferred 'morph' spelling into the trade press. Fortunately for us, we were working on music videos and television commercials that showed off the technique well, and ILM only used their tool for a few shots in a few movies.

I think that Black or White is still the most impressive morph ever done -- probably because we spent about six person-months refining it. Jamie Dixon and Amie Slate did the bulk of the work for that video.

Thad Beier

Don't do free work for a non-free project!

[mankey wanker]

Submit these words to a free resource, not the OED - the OED is *SO* not free. WTF?