Attestation

Juda answered: The man declared unto us with the attestation of an oath, saying: You shall not see my face, unless you bring your youngest brother with you.

The attestation was the usual one signed by the witnesses, showing that the full requirements of the statute were observed.

A historical dictionary cannot do this though it cannot also neglect this aspect because the attestation of a rare meaning is bound to be very limited.

The eastern-most attestation of Sl skola in the meaning of synagogue appears to be in Smolensk Russian.

So something must have been developing over long periods empty of attestation; and whatever it was, it must (by principles to be discussed in the next section) have been a language of the usual kind.

For each word, the date of its first attestation in the English language, as documented in the Oxford English Dictionary, and its frequency of occurrence in the British National Corpus are given.

Furthermore, the first attestations given in the OED are not always the earliest attestations in print; since the first edition was finished in 1928, many earlier and later examples have been identified, and these will be incorporated into the third edition, currently underway (see Durkin 2002 for a discussion of how much this is likely to change the dates of attestation in the OED as a whole).

In the first edition this is generally chronological, i.e. following the earliest date of attestation for each sense