Sci-fi nerds and aficionados, I'm about to derail your day. The HISTORICAL DICTIONARY OF SCIENCE FICTION, which tracks down how sci-fi terms were first used, and then evolved over time, launched this week: https://sfdictionary.com/
One of the main goals of historical lexicography is finding antedatings, as instances that push back the earliest known use of a term are called. By poring through oodles of issues of old sci-fi, including the massive trove of them scanned by the Internet Archive, the site's creator has made some truly delightful discoveries — often discovering that well-known sci-fi terms were used a lot earlier than readers may have suspected: "Deep space" was first used in 1921, "ray gun" in 1923, and "teleported" in 1931 ("The essential elements of sea-water, minus the undesirable saline properties, can be teleported to Mars", in Clark Ashton Smith's "Planet Entity").
The dictionary also illustrates the complicated interplay between imaginative literature and the real world. The words "graviton" and "biotechnician," for example, first appeared in science fiction sources before being adopted in the real world.
Read more about the Dictionary at Boing Boing: https://boingboing.net/.../the-historical-dictionary-of... and (if you have a subscription) the New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/.../science-fiction-dictionary.html - or just go straight to the source and dive in: https://sfdictionary.com/.
Originally posted on Facebook.