Talk:panegyry

Milton's Use & Obsoleteness

Webster's entry on the noun gives Milton as having used it. Neither the Poetical Works, nor the Prose Works, nor the Cambridge Manuscript (at least the parts transcribed here) seem to contain the word. The word does appear in the plural, however, in The Reason of Church-Government. I've added the quote containing the plural to the entry for panegyries. In the singular I have been unable to find a citation from the 17th century, though the word is claimed to be first attested in 1602, and despite a misattribution to Ben Johnson here (compare Johnson's First Folio, which uses the standard spelling). If someone can find a quote from Milton's corpus in the singular, please add it.

However, the word saw its greatest use in the 19th century, I suspect due to its use in the translation of the Rosetta stone and thus many Egyptological works like Horæ Aegyptiacæ or Museum of Antiquity, and fictional works set in the period like One of Cleopatra's Nights. The word has retained its use in the Egyptological context and is often used in translations of ancient Egyptian texts: see here (17), here (pg. 120), here (pg. 8, 10, etc.), and here (the text is introduced historiographically but the translation is original). I've thus changed the designation from obsolete to Egyptological/archaic.

Therefore the spelling seems more subject-specific than obsolete.