The first occurrence in English of " ontology " as recorded by the OED ( Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989 ) appears in Nathaniel Bailey's dictionary of 1721, which defines ontology as ' an Account of being in the Abstract ' - though, of course, such an entry indicates the term was already in use at the time.

Another related term is moresque, meaning " Moorish "; Randle Cotgrave's A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues of 1611 defines this as: " a rude or anticke painting, or carving, wherin the feet and tayles of beasts, & c, are intermingled with, or made to resemble, a kind of wild leaves, & c ." and " arabesque ", in its earliest use cited in the OED ( but as a French word ), as " Rebeske work ; a small and curious flourishing ".

" McJob " was in use at least as early as 1986, according to the Oxford English Dictionary ( OED ), which defines it as " An unstimulating, low-paid job with few prospects, esp.

The Oxford English Dictionary ( OED ) defines it, under Spy, as " a game in which one player selects an object ( visible to all ) for the others to guess, giving them its colour or its initial letter with the words ' I spy with my little eye something ( blue, etc.

The original OED from the beginning of the 20th century, defines the term as " a ' master ' who lived before the period accounted ' modern ', chiefly applied to painters from the 13th to the 16th or 17th century.

The Oxford English Dictionary ( OED ) defines the term as " a route or network for the high-speed transfer of information ; esp.

The OED defines it as " The state or quality of being mindful ; attention ; regard ", with obsolete meanings of " memory " and " intention, purpose ".

The OED defines Save 8 " To keep, protect or guard ( a thing ) from damage, loss, or destruction ", and elaborates,

In 1933, it fully replaced the name in all occurrences to The Oxford English Dictionary ( OED ) in its reprinting as twelve volumes with a one volume supplement and more supplements came over the years until in 1989 when the second edition was published in twenty volumes.

The first sense of " assume " in the OED is " to take unto ( oneself ), receive, accept, adopt .” The term was originally employed in religious contexts as in “ to receive up into heaven ,” especially “ the reception of the Virgin Mary into heaven, with body preserved from corruption ,” ( 1297 CE ) but it was also simply used to refer to “ receive into association ” or “ adopt into partnership .” Moreover, other senses of assumere included ( i ) “ investing oneself with ( an attribute ), ” ( ii ) “ to undertake ” ( especially in Law ), ( iii ) “ to take to oneself in appearance only, to pretend to possess ,” and ( iv ) “ to suppose a thing to be ” ( all senses from OED entry on “ assume ”; the OED entry for “ assumption ” is almost perfectly symmetrical in senses ).

In military parlance, a " cul-de-sac " refers to a situation where an army is " hemmed in on all sides but behind "< ref > OED, online edition, draft revision December 2007, entry for cul-de-sac, n < sup > 2 </ sup ></ ref > " Cul-de-sac " is also used metaphorically to mean a line of thought or action that leads nowhere.

Onions wrote that SOED was " to present in miniature all the features of the principal work " and to be " a quintessence of those vast materials " in the complete OED.

The Oxford English Dictionary ( OED ) quotes as the term's earliest usage the 1839 long poem " Festus " by English poet Philip J. Bailey: " I am an omnist, and believe in all religions ".

The OED elaborates that an omnist believes " in a single transcendent purpose or cause uniting all things or people ".

He glosses it as meaning servos militum and explains it as meaning " stupid ", by reference to classical Latin bāro " simpleton, dunce "; because of this early reference, the word has also been suggested to derive from an otherwise unknown Celtic * bar, but OED takes this to be " a figment ".

However OED says that some recorded uses of the name predate 1830, and hence this theory is discredirted.

" The OED cites this usage from Addison's The Tatler in 1710 with similar uses from the 1800s.

The Oxford English Dictionary ( OED ) still uses gendarmery as the principal spelling while Merriam-Webster uses gendarmerie as the principal spelling.

The OED cites uses of the meta-prefix as " beyond, about " ( such as meta-economics and meta-philosophy ) going back to 1917.

The earliest entries for the word " cognitive " in the OED take it to mean roughly pertaining " to the action or process of knowing ".

The word datura comes from the Hindi dhatūrā (" thorn apple "); record of this name dates back to 1662 ( OED ).

The Oxford English Dictionary ( OED ) describes libre as obsolete, but the word has come back into limited use.

The Oxford English Dictionary ( OED ) gives 1771 as the date of the earliest written use of the word in English.

According to the OED, John Paul Scott coined the word " sociobiology " at a 1946 conference on genetics and social behaviour, and became widely used after it was popularized by Edward O. Wilson in his 1975 book, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis.

OED also claims that the theory is that it comes from the Czech word půlka (" half "), referring to the short half-steps featuring in the dance, is now " discredited ".

Evidence for this etymology comes from the OED, which notes the name " shark " first came into use after Sir John Hawkins ' sailors exhibited one in London in 1569 and used the word " sharke " to refer to the large sharks of the Caribbean Sea.

The name " chalcedony " comes from the Latin calcedonius, the word used to translate the Greek word khalkedon, found only once, in the Book of Revelation ; according to the OED a connection with the town of Chalcedon in Asia Minor is " very doubtful ".

The word atoll comes from the Dhivehi ( an Indo-Aryan language spoken on the Maldive Islands ) word atholhu ( Dhivehi: އ ަ ތ ޮ ޅ ު, )< sup > OED </ sup >.

The name is derived from lancea, Roman auxiliaries ' javelin, although according to the OED, the word may be of Iberian origin.

The OED states: " Portuguese and Spanish authors of the 16th c. agree in identifying the word with Portuguese and Spanish coco " grinning face, grin, grimace ", also " bugbear, scarecrow ", cognate with cocar " to grin, make a grimace "; the name being said to refer to the face-like appearance of the base of the shell, with its three holes.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary ( OED ), the word comes ultimately from Greek (, " accent of ' turning away ', or elision "), through Latin and French.

OED gives the translation " star-taker " for the English word " astrolabe " and traces it, through medieval Latin, to a Greek word astrolabos.

Etymologically, according to the OED, the word matriarchy is first attested in 1885, building on an earlier matriarch, formed in analogy to patriarch, already in use in the early 17th century.

The Oxford English Dictionary ( OED ) says that the word puss is common to several Germanic languages, usually as a call name for the cat — not a synonym for cat, as it is in English.

Though the word " voivodeship " ( other spellings are " voievodship " and " voivodship ") appears in English dictionaries such as the OED and Webster's, it is not in common general usage, and voivodeships in Poland and elsewhere are frequently referred to as " provinces ".

The name lapwing has been variously attributed to the " lapping " sound its wings make in flight, from the irregular progress in flight due to its large wings ( OED derives this from an Old English word meaning " to totter "), or from its habit of drawing potential predators away from its nest by trailing a wing as if broken.

The OED traces the word to the 15th century: various Latin vocabularies translate balducta, bedulta, or casius as " poshet ", " poshoote ", " possyt ", or " possot ".

The OED cites the use of the word to 1297.

According to the OED ( 2nd edition, 1989 ), whom is " no longer current in natural colloquial speech ".

The OED credits Francis Bacon in his Essays ( 1605 ) with the first use of " Cabinet council ", where it is described as a foreign habit, of which he disapproves: " For which inconveniences, the doctrine of Italy, and practice of France, in some kings ’ times, hath introduced cabinet counsels ; a remedy worse than the disease ".

In George Puttenham ’ s The Arte of English Poesie ( 1589 ) aporia is “ the Doubtful, called ... because oftentimes we will seem to caste perils, and make doubts of things when by a plaine manner of speech we might affirm or deny .” In another reference from 1657, J. Smith ’ s Mystical Rhetoric, the term becomes “ a figure whereby the speaker sheweth that he doubteth, either where to begin for the multitude of matters, or what to do or say in some strange or ambiguous thing ” ( OED ).

It then made a perilous wartime journey to Britain where it came under the wing of the OUP, which decided it would be the perfect counterpart for the prestigious OED.