Why didn’t the OED accept the police notebook (pictured above) as evidence of domestic?
When a former police officer sent in his notebook featuring the word domestic we thought we had hit the jackpot with a six year antedating of the noun. But it didn’t cut the mustard with the OED… John Simpson, OED Chief Editor: The police notebook was potentially ideal evidence. Although it wasn’t published, it was datable from internal evidence – and we were very excited by the prospect of finding such an early example of the noun ‘domestic’. But although the source was acceptable, we needed to look at the text it provided. And that was the problem. The single word domestic was presented without any context. Perhaps it was a noun, short for ‘domestic argument’ or something similar; or perhaps it was just the adjective domestic written as an aide-memoire for the police officer to use when writing up his notes. For us to say that this example was truly the first example of the noun, we have to be absolutely certain. If you start introducing ambiguous evidence, then the whole edifice of
