An attempt to find cutthroat compounds in A supplement to Johnson's English dictionary: of which the palpable errors are attempted to be rectified, and its material omissions supplied (1801) by George Mason, 1735-1806.
- Download the plain text from archive.org
- Find most of the (capped up) headwords using something like:
grep -oh "^[A-Z][A-Z'-]\+" supplementtojohn00masouoft_djvu.txt > supplementtojohn00masouoft_djvu-words.txt - Find hyphenated words:
grep "-" supplementtojohn00masouoft_djvu-words.txt > supplementtojohn00masouoft_djvu-hyphenated-words.txt - Find potential cuttroats using this script (but modified to remove
'chars and make lowercase):python -u cutthroat.py -i supplementtojohn00masouoft_djvu-hyphenated-words.txt > supplementtojohn00masouoft_djvu-potential-cutthroats.txt - Check the list.
A quick look at the final list gives these potential cutthroats:
- hold-door
- kill-courtesy
- lack-love
- pitch-farthing
- wave-loaf
- wave-offering
Of which, hold-door isn't on the list of 892. Mason defines it (src):
HO'LD-DOOR. adj. Assisting amorous intercourse.
Brethren and sisters of the hold-door trade !
Shaks. Tro. and Cressida.
The quote is from Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida (1602).
The three lists are included in full here in case anyone wishes to check them in more detail.
