Attestation

Pronunciation

• UK IPA: /ˈæ.tÉ›s.teɪ.ʃən/
• Rhymes: -eɪʃən

Origin

From Middle French attestation

Noun

1. A thing that serves to bear witness, confirm or authenticate.
2. A confirmation or authentication.
3. (business, finance) The process, performed by accountants or auditors, of providing independent opinion on published financial and other business information of a business, public agency, or other organization.
4. (linguistics, of a language or word) An appearance in print or otherwise recorded on a permanent medium.
• 1997, Roger Lass, Historical Linguistics and Language Change, page 23,So something must have been developing over long periods empty of attestation; and whatever it was, it must (by principles to be discussed in the next section) have been a language of the usual kind.
• 2009, Ingo Plag, Maria Braun, Sabine Lappe, Mareile Schramm, Introduction to English Linguistics, page 110,For each word, the date of its first attestation in the English language, as documented in the Oxford English Dictionary, and its frequency of occurrence in the British National Corpus are given.
• 2010, Kathryn Allan, Tracing metonymic polysemy through time: MATERIAL FOR OBJECT mappings in the OED, Margaret E. Winters, Heli Tissari, Kathryn Allan (editors), Historical Cognitive Linguistics, page 176,Furthermore, the first attestations given in the OED are not always the earliest attestations in print; since the first edition was finished in 1928, many earlier and later examples have been identified, and these will be incorporated into the third edition, currently underway (see Durkin 2002 for a discussion of how much this is likely to change the dates of attestation in the OED as a whole).