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EL&U Meta's very own community-wiki-based question What good reference works on English are available? includes an answer headed "Historical Resources" that consists of sections devoted to early (pre–Samuel Johnson) general dictionaries and somewhat early (pre-1900) slang dictionaries. That answer is currently at 15 upvotes, so you have to ...
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Yes, proverb or idiom analog requests are very much on-topic.
But, like SWRs, there may be in practice lots of ways to ask these badly and attract too many poor answers.
For proverb/idiom requests, if they are looking for a corresponding one from another language/culture, please give the original language version (the answer may be very close to a ...
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This seems like the perfect job for the Early English Books Online corpus which is 755 million words covering the 1470s to 1690s. You can access this via the BYU website. It’s very easy to use for basic searches, though there’s a lot more that you can do.
For late in your time frame (late 1700s+), try newspaper databases. The only problem with that is these ...
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Google is usually my go to source for finding examples of specific expressions. You can enclose your expression in double quotes and it will make it match it verbatim. (Google Search’s number of hits will not be accurate however unless you go to the last page of results.) You can use the same search in the book tab to get hits in books. You can also specify ...
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If you're on a Macintosh, then Unicode characters are built in and easy to use, including the entire International Phonetic Alphabet, and plenty of nonce characters for phonetic and phonemic entities. You can find them all under the title Emoji & Symbols, at the bottom of the Edit menu, to the right of the File menu, in all Mac applications.
Except for ...
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On Android, I use the IPA keyboard, but when I'm on PC, I write them using 'Type IPA symbols' website and copy-paste them.
You might want to read Alfred's IPA Made Easy: A Guidebook for the International Phonetic Alphabet, Author(s): Anna Wentlent (PDF), it has all the IPA symbols with examples in English, French, German, Italian, Latin and Spanish.
Also ...
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Some IPA symbols have HTML entity codes with more or less logical names/abbrevations, so you can type them in plain ASCII:
æ becomes æ
ð becomes ð
ñ becomes ñ
But most of them, like the schwa, only have numbers, which will be hard to remember:
ə becomes ə
A full list is available here.
Copied from my answer here.
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One valuable resource is Lexicons of Early Modern English (LEME) from the University of Toronto, which has searchable full-text of early printed English lexicons from 1480-1755. Using that and Early English Books Online (EEBO) together is a powerful combo for helping to date specific uses of words.
If you want to go earlier, the Middle English Compendium ...
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Here’s my side of things:
I saw the question (before any major edits) and wanted to quote some of the Wikipedia article for context.
I tried to do that but stopped when it looked like the edit would have answered the question, by having a link to a page with a definition of the term.
It was at that point that I voted to close the question, the fourth close ...
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The answer seems to be no, you can’t sort by date in the BNC. If anyone knows otherwise, then I’d be interested!
You might get a date for a specific hit by clicking on it though this may end up being “(1985-1994)” which is useless for any purpose I can think of. When that happens I try to see if Google can find the context by searching for part of the ...
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The OED gives 96 variations of the spelling of "naught/nought" (of which not one is "nort") For the word "naughty", it gives a mere 12 varieties but this is probably quite low.
All this is not remarkable as English spelling did not seriously start to become regular until the 17th century.
Nought/naught (in any of its spellings ...
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I always find Google Books to be an exquisitely insightful source for finding early uses of a distinct word, as their catalog is so vast, and has scans of so many antiquarian and scarce books which otherwise would be neglected, that it is sincerely "The stuff that dreams are made on" for any bibliophile, whatsoever.
Google Books: Books (written in ...
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There is no rule that specifically prohibits such questions, and there is, in principle, no reason why there should be.
Proverbs, however, tend to be very much culture-bound, so the correct answer to such questions will very often be 'There is no analogous proverb in English'. Such an answer would, however, not satisfy the standards of this site, so it won't ...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
