Brewer, Charlotte (2021). "Top sources in OED3". Examining the OED. Charlotte Brewer. Retrieved December 1, 2021.
When the OED quotes an author as its first example in an entry, that does not necessarily mean that the author made the word up or is evidence of the author's lexical creativity. Rather it tells us of the OED lexicographers’ enthusiasm for citing that particular author as a quotation source, meaning that they found first quotations in that work because they looked for such vocabulary there rather than in previously published texts. The more quotations gathered from an individual source or for a particular period, the more likely the lexicographers were to find new (i.e. previously unrecorded) words there (see Examining the OED).
