Posted by Robert Hill on June 15, 1999 at 16:43:58 from sun088.leeds.ac.uk:
The investigation of "galoot" led me to do some further playing with
the online OED, to which I have access thanks to the fact that I
work in a university whose library has paid for it.
It turns out that you can ask it for all quotations from a given
author that are used in the Dictionary. Readers of this board
may be interested to learn that the OED contains 49 quotations by
A. Ransome, and while one or two of these (e.g. for "stethometer")
seem to be some other Ransome, the great majority are by our Ransome.
Words illustrated by these quotations include
aged (ppl. a.), cart (v.), gormless, Octobrist, piling (vbl. n.),
plunk, press- (prefix; "a press-in lid"), scrumple, scummy,
scutter, swig, telephoto, thenabouts, undies.