#psittacula krameri borealis

[foxyfatality]

Rose-ringed parakeet (Psittacula krameri borealis) male, Jaipur, Rajasthan, India Taken by Charles J. Sharp on the 7th of November, 2019

[yesthatsatumbler]

i dearly wish that more resources gave the actual context of first use rather than just the date. clearly they ought to have the information if they're citing it!

Very +1 here. (Comments mention that OED technically does this but is really hard to access.)

One word I've often specifically been wondering about is "parrot". Merriam-Webster dates it to "ca. 1525"; Wiktionary says "first attested in 1525"; Etymonline hedges with "1520s".

The poem Speke, Parrot by John Skelton is usually attributed to 1521 (thus is Britannica; there are apparently studies suggesting an even earlier date, in the late 1510s). This makes it plausibly either the first instance of the word in English or very close to it (indeed those dates would make it older than the first instance of the word in English).

One interesting way to interpret it being the first instance (or nearly so; even discounting the seeming paradox of it being older than the word, John Skelton died in 1529 so it cannot be any newer than that) but using the word so freely is that "Parrot" might not actually be used as a word here: it's the bird's name. Parrot is, to quote the poem itself, "a pretty popagay" ("popagay" being a variant of an earlier English term for the same kind of bird).

...there are apparently reasons to suspect that at the time it would, at least, have been the French term for that kind of bird. But the etymology is murky (and indeed one of the proposed etymons is the name "Pierrot") and it's funny to think about how the normal term for a kind of bird could be derived from the personal name of a character in a particular poem (which was apparently obscure for a while after Skelton's death, and then briefly famous almost five centuries later when the YouTube version came out).

...As a biological side-note, in case you were wondering, the titular protagonist of Skelton's poem is a rose-ringed parakeet, Psittacula krameri (subsp. borealis, I think, if we take the description of its origin literally) - a (sub)species that is now a common feral invasive across the world, but at the time was probably still a rare import from India. They do apparently have ruby-colored circlets on their necks - the photos, at least, look very pretty!

where to go if one wants to see first written instance of a word. is there a method/resource or do you just happen to have the good files.

it depends on the word! some dictionaries, like merriam-webster online, will include the first known usage of a word in its entry; sometimes etymonline has it; and sometimes it just hasn't been dug up (yet). i dearly wish that more resources gave the actual context of first use rather than just the date. clearly they ought to have the information if they're citing it!

those are the resources i use most often for etymology questions on this blog - i don't usually have the "good files" for english historical linguistics since i never formally studied it, but i do have years of research experience so i'm fairly quick about assessing sources.