Wanderin' Thoughts

So this happened today when I was looking up a word from The Discoverie of Witchcraft. I came across this list of fantastical creatures:

…and they have so fraied us with bull beggers, spirits, witches, urchens, elves, hags, fairies, satyrs, pans, faunes, sylens, kit with the cansticke, tritons, centaurs, dwarfes, giants, imps, calcars, conjurors, nymphes, changlings, Incubus, Robin good-fellowe, the spoorne, the mare, the man in the oke, the hell waine, the fierdrake, the puckle, Tom thombe, hob gobblin, Tom tumbler, boneles, and such other bugs…

And I was all: What’s a spoorne? Like, I’ve heard of most of the others, but spoorne is new to me. So, I went to the ever-faithful OED and typed the word in. No entries. That’s not unusual, y’all. It happens a lot, given how many spelling variants pop up in early texts. But when I took the /e/ off the end, up pops an entry for spoorn. And guess what the first quotation is? The quote from this very book — using the same spelling I just searched. >_<

So why wouldn’t the OED pick up spoorne if it literally quotes that spelling? Well, the OED’s search engine doesn’t automatically include every historical variant — especially if that variant doesn’t have its own headword. Just a glance at the quotations will give you an idea of how many different variations of any one word there are. Just this one word, spoorn is spelled spoorn, spoorne, spurne, and spurn. And language changes all the time. Even now. Like, googled as a verb meaning “to search” didn’t exist when I was a kid. Neither did meh — or a couple dozen other words we use all the time now.

And hurted is a word too! (Don’t tell my spellchecker.) What I’m trying to say is: language is fluid. If the OED tried to list every single variant of every single word, they’d never keep up.

Anyway, the OED editors usually pick one “lemma” (that’s the standard form) to represent all the known spellings of a word. Unless a variant is specifically cross-referenced in their database, the search engine won’t pull it up. Basically, spoorne is in there. It’s just hiding.

When I did a regular internet search, it pulled up a couple of hits for spoorn and sporn, so there’s that. Obviously, there’s a big difference between an internet search and an internal database like the OED’s. Still, I found it kind of funny. Also, of all the words I’ve looked up from this book, this is the first time I’ve seen one of them actually quoted in the dictionary. I honestly thought they’d purposely left it out because of its content. ^_^

Now I’m off to find out who “the man in the oke” is.

Thanks for reading, y’all. Take care, and I’ll chat at you later