I n the days before the Internet, I came to e that one of the characteristics that really distinguished
was the quality of the historical re-arch that went into their compilation. Later, we had help from all manner of digital resources to discover earlier references to the words or phras we were working on. Back then, it was just the rearcher against a shelf full of books and library catalogues, and no one gave you any hints about where to start looking. A classic example of this is illustrated by the work we conducted to rearch the history of the expression
War. But Lesley had a rious problem here. She had an armful of documentary evidence for thin red line collected over a hundred years or so by the diction-ary’s “readers,” but none of this pre-dated 1935 and a jingoistic4 occurrence in a novel by George Orwell. The Battle of Balaclava took place on 25 October 1854. So either the expression thin red line had nothing to do with the battle, or our documentary evidence started almost a hundred years too late.
5 For the everyday dictionary edi-tor, there were precious few resources on the Crimean War in the language-flavoured OED library. But all was not lost. In rearching the expression in the dictionary’s reference library, Lesley had followed protocol5 and in-spected quotations dictionaries, just on the off-chance6. As well as the standard
