Yes...epicaricacy

jheem suggested that I ask Jesse Sheidlower why "epicaricacy" isn't in the OED. Here was his gracious response:

"The OED wouldn't exclude a word just because it is regarded as etymologically malformed. I can't tell for sure why it was omitted without doing more research than I have time for at the moment, but my assumption would be that it simply doesn't have the currency. The OED doesn't include every word that has ever appeared in any other dictionary; if the only example was in Bailey, and there aren't any (or are only extremely few) examples in real-world contexts, it would have been omitted for that reason.

Examples on the Web seem mostly to be in the category of self-conscious or self-referential uses, where the word does not appear in natural running text but rather in statements of the sort 'do you know what epicaricacy means?.' Such words--and there are many that can be found in dictionaries of obscure words and the like--are never likely to be entered in any general dictionary.

Thanks for your comments on my DYSA appearance. I enjoyed meeting Uncle Jazzbeaux the other day.

Best,

Jesse Sheidlower
Oxford English Dictionary"

So there you have it!

Here was his gracious response

This is pretty much what I've been saying.

This is pretty much what I've been saying.

You have to rub it in, don't you?

Yeah, yeah, I know. And everyone else.

Still, I am going to alert him to Tinman's find in the 1852 OED. If nothing else, he'll know we are serious and not just being "self referential!"

Here is what Jesse says about Tinman's post:

"Yes, the Greek word Dean Trench is quoting in that OED example is _epichairekakia_ in the usual transliteration. But I'm not sure what the relevance is; no one denies the existence of the word in Greek, nor that it is the source of the (vanishingly rare) English word _epicaricacy_. But Trench is citing it specifically as a Greek word, just as he quotes _Schadenfreude_ as a German word, which is why that quote appears in brackets at the OED entry for _schadenfreude_."

I suppose that the e-word detractors have been saying that all along too. I just wonder how a German word gained that definition in our vocabulary, whereas many more of our words have Greek or Latin roots.