Collocations and First-Citations from Dickens in the OED2 on CD-ROM

Abstract

In his painstaking work Charles Dickens: Linguistic Innovator (1985), Knud Sørensen pointed out an innovative aspect of Dickens’ prose by focusing on neologisms, syntactic and stylistic oddities. He found 1059 neologisms (used in a broad sense) in Dickens’ fiction, including periodical essays, basing his work on a close and sensitive reading of the texts, utilizing the OED and its Supplement. The majority (732) of these are recorded in the OED. Consequently, he concluded that Charles Dickens was ‘linguistically ahead of his time’, that is to say, a linguistic innovator (Sørensen 1984: 238). Sørensen also states that such a study of writers’ neologisms is intended not only to identify stylistic character and form part of an assessment of literary achievement, but may also serve as a contribution to language history (p. 247).