Sleuthing the Source, Syllable by Syllable

The elevator opened on the top floor of the Library of Congress's Adams Building. The word dick strolled out, a bulging backpack slung over his shoulder. He walked past the guard, through the reading room, then pushed through a door marked "Authorized Staff Only" and unlocked his office.

Light from an overcast sky slanted in through the slats of the Venetian blinds. A battered desk groaned beneath a mountain of books: "The Journal of Documentary Reproduction," "The Complete Book of Surfing," "Studs Lonigan," an ordnance manual from 1841.

"You're a detective," said Jon Simon of his job, "trying to find the first use."

The first use. That magical moment a word makes its first tentative steps into the English language, chosen by a writer, published in a novel or a newspaper. These things matter when you work for the Oxford English Dictionary, as Jon, the word dick, does.

That's "dick" as in "a detective; a policeman," used, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, as early as 1912 by author A.H. Lewis in his book "Apaches of N.Y.": "Still, those plain-clothes dicks did not despair."

The Oxford English Dictionary -- or OED -- is an impressive human achievement, as impressive in its own way as the suspension bridge or the insulin pump or the atom bomb. Started in 1857, it was expected to take 10 years to finish. The first edition wasn't completed until 1928. It's in a constant state of updating. New words keep joining the English language.

And Jon and his colleagues keep tracing their origins.

"I guess it's kind of like a quasi-scientific endeavor," said Jon, who estimates he has researched in the neighborhood of 10,000 words since 1990, when he left his full-time job as a research librarian at the Library of Congress and joined the OED. "It's like the archaeology of words."

Each word brings a different challenge. Sometimes Jon is asked to interdate a word. That means finding a published example of its usage between two dates. Sometimes he must postdate a word: find a usage later than that currently on file with the dictionary. A word detective's favorite assignment is antedating: finding the earliest published example of a word or expression.

An expression like "bad hair day," which Jon found in a 1988 article in the Santa Rosa Press Democrat. (He called the reporter who wrote the story. She told him she'd heard it from her teenage kids.)

The Web has made his job easier, as has Google Books. Jon, 56, spends a few hours each day surfing from his Silver Spring home. He said he was once called "a human optical scanner."

But it's here at the Library of Congress that Jon does most of his hunting. "They have so many things you wouldn't find anywhere else," he said. Newspapers from all over the country. Obscure scientific journals. Album liner notes.