Charabancs driven into history as Collins culls the obsolete

THE days of taking a charabanc to the aerodrome are gone forever, according to dictionary compilers.

The words, which conjure up images of the golden age of travel, are among dozens which have become extinct in the past year, according to experts compiling the next Collins Dictionary.

Researchers drew up a list of words which have fallen out of use by tracking how often they appear in publications.

Other words on the list include wittol, meaning a man who tolerates his wife’s unfaithfulness and which appeared in the One Thousand and One Nights tales of Arabian folklore translated into English in the early 18th century. However, it has not been much used since the 1940s.

The terms drysalter, a dealer in certain chemical products and foods, and alienism, the study and treatment of mental illness, have also faded from use.

Some of the vanished words are old-fashioned modes of transport such as the cyclogiro, a type of aircraft propelled by rotating blades, and charabanc.

The stauroscope, an optical instrument for studying the crystal structure of minerals under polarised light, is also no longer used.

Dr Ruth O’Donovan, asset development manager at Collins’s language division in Glasgow, said: “We track words using a very large database of lan-guage, which is a very large collection of various texts from spoken and written language.

“We track new words, but we can also track for the frequency of existing words, and when they get below a certain threshold we see them as being obsolete, though they may be used in very specialist circumstances.

“Such words are in our largest dictionary, but we’ve categorised them as obsolete, as, although they go out of general use, they are still of interest to historians. But we would exclude them from our smaller dictionaries.”

Professor Christian Kay, an expert in the development of language at the University of Glasgow, said words reflected on-going changes in society.

“It is natural evolution to see words fall from use,” he said. “Most of the words Collins have identified sound like 19th- or early 20th-century terms, and their disappearance is part of the history of progress.

“They are all words to do with obsolete concepts, but some of them could be used for something entirely different in the future – charabanc, for example, sounds like a word which might reappear.”

Prof Kay, who spent more than 40 years helping compile the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, published in 2009, containing almost the entire vocabulary of English from Old English to the present day, added: “These are all useful words, and technology is evolving all the time. Even the word wittol hardly being used reflects how society has changed.

“There is no case for keeping words artificially alive, though there can be a bit of regret when some words are no longer used.”

Other words the Collins experts identified as having passed out of use include supererogate, meaning to do more than is required; succedaneum, which is something used as a substitute; and woolfell, the skin of an animal with the fleece still attached.

They also said the 21st-century entry fun fur had changed in meaning from the 1960s, when it meant cheap fur from animals such as rabbits, to the current day meaning of synthetic fur.

The next edition of the Collins dictionary will be published in October.