attestation

Etymology

attest + -ation; from Middle French attestation, from Latin attestātiō.

noun

1. A thing that serves to bear witness, confirm, or authenticate; validation, verification, documentation.
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, word, word form, or word meaning) An appearance in print or otherwise recorded on a permanent medium.
   A historical dictionary cannot do this though it cannot also neglect this aspect because the attestation of a rare meaning is bound to be very limited. 1972, Indian Linguistics, volumes 33-34, Linguistic Society of India, →ISSN, →JSTOR, →OCLC, page 237
   The eastern-most attestation of Sl skola in the meaning of synagogue appears to be in Smolensk Russian. 1987, Paul Wexler, Explorations in Judeo-Slavic Linguistics, page 125
   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. 1997, Roger Lass, Historical Linguistics and Language Change, page 23
   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. 2009, Ingo Plag, Maria Braun, Sabine Lappe, Mareile Schramm, Introduction to English Linguistics, page 110
   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). 2010, Kathryn Allan, “Tracing metonymic polysemy through time: MATERIAL FOR OBJECT mappings in the OED”, in Margaret E. Winters, Heli Tissari, Kathryn Allan, editors, Historical Cognitive Linguistics, →ISSN, page 176
   In the first edition this is generally chronological, i.e. following the earliest date of attestation for each sense 2012, Alexander Bergs, English Historical Linguistics, volume 2, Walter de Gruyter, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 1154