I'm a young Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language.

We talk about writing, history, rules, and cool stuff.

Today I have two pieces of language-related news, and then we'll talk about how you can

use playwriting techniques to improve your writing.

If you have some free time and are looking for an interesting project, the Oxford English

dictionary is asking for help and to dating words.

That means seeing if you can find a publication that uses a word earlier than the first citation

they already have in the dictionary.

The prefix anti-ant-te means earlier, so antidating is looking for an earlier date.

And you probably have a good chance of success, too, because when the editors updated the entries

they want help with, the digital resources we take for granted today didn't exist.

So the odds are good you could find in earlier use just by searching databases, such as

early English books online and Google Books.

They just need people to do it.

And how fun would it be to know that you found the first citation that goes on to appear

in the Oxford English dictionary?

Here's how they describe it.

Note the resources to allow a complete recheck of all these databases are simply not available

at the moment.

The OED's lexiconographers are fully occupied with other aspects of work on the dictionary.

But this is where crowdsourcing can come in.

People can contribute the quotations they find, either by filling in a form on the appeal

...