Drear

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First meaning is gory and bloody and horrible!  Then on the word moved to “sad”, then melancholy and dull.  “Drear” is a poetic shortening.

  • 02.028 Not far ahead were dreary hills,
  • 03.001 and drear it looked,
  • 09.012 This is the dreariest
  • 10.003 Dreary as had been his imprisonment
  • 14.002 and drear even
  • 19.004 So sad and so dreary?

“dreary, adj.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, June 2015. Web. 27 July 2015.

Dream-dinners

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This concept is not a word attested in OED.

  • 08.067 Dream-dinners aren’t any good,

Sometimes we settle for any kind of dinner we can get.  I note here that Tolkien and C.S.Lewis have notably sumptuous descriptions of meals – I’ve heard it said that British authors who survived war rationing have a tendency to do so.  Can anyone link me a good paper on the topic?  Brian Jacques, whose Redwall banquets make my mouth water, was a child in World War II.

Dragon-slay

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I do not find “dragonslay”, “dragon-slay”, “dragonslayer”, “dragon-slayer”, “dragonslayings,” or “dragon-slayings” anywhere in the most common 100,000 words of the Project Gutenberg corpus!  I will double check, as this is a quite unexpected finding.  Neither is it as a single word (even a two-word single entry) in the OED.

  • 12.090 and they all began discussing dragon-slayings historical,
  • 15.056 as the dragon-slayer,