(You can tell my writing isn't going well, I'm finding other things to get obsessed with.
)
I can't vouch for the veracity of the information on this
link, but what it says is:
Quote:
[...]Anybody who cites these based on the OED’s evidence risks being regarded as out of touch. Most of the entries haven’t been revised since they were compiled a century ago. Our etymological knowledge has improved greatly since then and has had a huge boost from the introduction of searchable digitised archives. I trawled the British Library’s archive of nineteenth-century newspapers to check how original these words really were. A lot weren’t.
Boredom, for example, which Dickens included in Bleak House in 1853, is known from the Theatrical Examiner of April 1841; he used casualty ward in Sketches by Boz in 1836 but it’s known from Jackson’s Oxford Journal dated January 1825; [...]
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But he also adds:
Quote:
[...]Other terms are certainly his to claim, including sawbones, messiness, whizz-bang, unpromisingly, spiflication and seediness. [...]
As these examples show, we must always be sceptical of claims about who invented a word. Deeper digging often demonstrates that others had got to them first. But nobody is going to be less attracted by Dickens through knowing that.
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(Although given his assertion on how sceptical we must be about such claims, you are left wondering why he is so certain of the words listed in the above quote.)