Electronic word sleuthing provides etymologists with fertile new territory to explore in their quest to get as close as possible to a word's true origin. For example, Fred Shapiro, a librarian and legal research lecturer at Yale University Law School, has been using JSTOR http://www.jstor.org to track down the origins of new words and expressions. JSTOR contains the full text, in facsimile form, of the complete back files of more than 150 important scholarly journals and, like the OED, also is available to UB students and staff. Shapiro, with financial support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, is checking the earliest usage of terms in JSTOR against the earliest usage of the same terms in the OED. The etymology of many words will be rewritten based on his research.

For example, the OED lists 1950 as the first appearance of the phrase "blue collar," but Shapiro's searching of JSTOR found that the phrase was used in an article from the American Sociological Review in 1942. The word "postmodern" is documented by the OED to have first appeared in 1949, but JSTOR can trace the word's origin back to 1936. The phrase "double standard" appeared in a 1912 issue of The American Political Science Review, 39 years before the quoted source in the OED. A lengthy listing of JSTOR antedatings can be found on the OED site at http://www.oed.com/public/news/9901_2.htm

Shapiro's findings are being incorporated into the OED's revision program. His research will join the work of the dictionary's staff of 120 scholars, research assistants, systems engineers and project managers, and 200 specialist consultants and readers, most of whom have been working on the project since 1993. In addition, scholars from around the world send in, on index cardsÑand more recently on emailÑdocumentation of a word's usage. Millions of these contributions are filed in the OED's offices and are reviewed during the revision process. All this work will conclude in 2010 when the dictionary will have been completely re-edited. This historic event will mark a new chapter in the understanding of the development and history of the English language.

A dictionary tour http://oed.com/public/tour/ is available for those interested in learning how to search the OED. Anyone needing assistance in searching JSTOR can find help at http://www.jstor.org/help/search.html.

For assistance connecting to the World Wide Web via UB computer accounts, contact the Computing Center Help Desk at 645-3542.