50 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 
reach, vocables which have lain hid after a half century 
of search from H-E-D’s legion of experts. 
It has been fancied that H-E-D has too hastily decided us¬ 
ages to be earliest,—and no doubt he has sometimes erred in 
this way. It is, however, an error he has watched against from 
the beginning with perpetual vigilance. With this view he has 
drawn up lists of his earliest usages so far as discovered by his 
readers, and begged from every one who knew of instances yet 
earlier the charity of making them known to him. Such lists 
—and often single words—have for live decades appeared 
among the queries in the London Weekly Notes and Queries. 
They have also been sent to every subscriber of H-ErD’s be¬ 
tween the leaves of sections as they have been mailed all over 
the world. 
One of these lists—a specimen of the series in which it is 
No. 12, contains 412 words, all between deacon and demonstra¬ 
tive, with the earliest date at which each one has been detected 
in use, and an earnest appeal to all persons who should fall in 
with earlier dates that they would forward those dates by let¬ 
ter or book-post to Oxford. 
This painstaking to ferret out earliest usage makes it very 
unlikely that words credited to Shakespeare as the first user can 
be espied in any author before him. 
It were easy to fill many pages in showing Shakespearian 
coinages of vocables which not only out-lived their author’s 
time but must for the most part pass current as long as our lan¬ 
guage lasts. The world has need of them and knows its need. 
But at present I must content myself with a word about a sin¬ 
gle formation. 
Many words with the suffix ment were made by Shakespeare. 
The list may well be headed with allayment which has been 
brought to light by H-E-D neither in any author before nor yet 
after Shakespeare’s own two uses of that coinage. The same 
may be said of cloyment. Hone of his predecessors had said 
abodement or bodement or annexment or engrossment. He cre¬ 
ated bewitchment and blastment—which no one caught from 
him before 1800. Cerement which he made in 1602 was not 
