Dragon-slay

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,

Dragon-fire

This beautiful word is not found in OED hyphenated or compound – it is JRRT original for our purposes, and much used by modern fantasy authors.  And my favorite form of the word?  Right here.  The ultimate lullabye.

  • 01.076 The dragon-fire, in twisted wire
  • 13.009 But certainly it was not a spark of dragon-fire,
  • 14.033 Dragon-fire and ruin!
  • 15.039 The dragon-fire, from twisted wire