#oed

The Oxford English Dictionary ran a search for pangrams in their example sentences. (A pangram is a sentence containing every letter of the alphabet.)

Amongst them was this beautiful accidental example from Caitlin Moran in the Times, 1993-07-10:

"Coming back from a jolly night out, slightly tanked up and woozy on the old pins, a quick blast of Bhangra would have me dancing exotic and erotic moves until I tripped over the cat."

A few days ago, I shared poems by Dickinson that include the word “November”; additionally, I posted the poem “Besides the Autumn poets sing,” a work which Mabel Loomis Todd titled “November” when she first published it in 1891.

In that poem, Dickinson referred to two poets of the day, James Thomson and William Cullen Bryant, and with the mention of Bryant, she alluded to his poem “The Death of the Flowers.”  I shared that poem on the 3rd (HERE).  

When I read Bryant’s work, I came across a word with which I was unfamiliar; it appears in the fourth stanza in these lines:

When the sound of dropping nuts is heard, though all the trees are still,  And twinkle in the smoky light the waters of the rill, The south wind searches for the flowers whose fragrance late he bore,  And sighs to find them in the wood and by the stream no more.

The waters of the rill?  What the hill is a rill?

From the OED: Rill: “A small stream; a brook; a rivulet.”  The dictionary adds, “Frequently poetic.”  

Dickinson was “frequently poetic,” so did she ever use the word “rill” in any of her poems?  As a matter of fact, yes, she did. She used "rill" in two poems, “Glowing is her bonnet” and “Forget! The Lady with the Amulet.”  The poems are below, and I’ll say more about them in a day or two.

Of course, because Dickinson used the word, it appears in the Dickinson Lexicon, and it says of “rill,” “Streamlet; rivulet; small brook; flow of water; temporary trickle on the ground caused by rainfall.” Hmm…I wonder why they have “brook” but not “brooklet, since they specified “streamlet” and “rivulet.”  The Lexicon also adds, “Origin obscure.”  The OED states this, “rill is perhaps a variant or alteration of another lexical item. Etymons: rail v.4; roil v.1. Additionally, it provides this usage chart – and “rill” was much more widely used in Dickinson’s time.

Originally posted in the Nonfiction Addiction community.

The Oxford English Dictionary wasn’t written overnight — it took over 70 years to complete. Volunteers from around the world mailed in over 5 million slips of paper with word examples.

Imagine dedicating decades to tracking down how words were used… only for new ones to pop up faster than you could keep up.