Discussion Groups / English Usage / January 2004

In an email exchange about a year ago, I used 'complicit' and was asked
about it, the reader not thinking it was 'a word'. Yet, I've used it for
many years and have seen it frequently in print. The 1973 minting date (to
my thinking) points to Watergate, either the formal hearings or the
reportage.

I'm curious to know what dictionary you looked in.  I've
looked in several American dictionaries without failing to
find "complicit".

Okay, now I've looked in a UK dictionary, the _Concise
Oxford Eighth Edition_:  "Complicity" is there but no
"complicit".  Sensing a possible US-UK difference, I look in
the _Chambers Dictionary_ (1993) and find that it isn't
there either.

But it's in the _New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary_:

   complicit /k<schwa>m"plIsIt/ a. L20.
   [Back-form. f. COMPLICITY.]
   Having or showing complicity, that is a party
   to or involved in wrongdoing.
   Independent The absurd notion..that all these
   people are complicit in some criminal conspiracy.

No mention of "especially US" or anything of the sort.  The
source "Independent" isn't much help.  The _NSOED_ "Guide to
the New SOED" doesn't expand on "Independent" as a source,
and there are newspapers called "Independent" scattered all
over the English-speaking world, according to Google.

What newspaper would British people think is likely to be
meant when they hear only that something has appeared in the
pages of the "Independent"?

Now I'm startled to find that the online _Oxford English
Dictionary_ has no entry for "complicit", although it has
"complice", "complicity", and "complicitous".  But it's not
so startling when I notice the "L20" in the _NSOED_ entry.
It stands for "late 20th century", so it seems it may have
been too new to have found its way into the _OED_.

But _Collegiate_ dictionaries starting with the ninth
edition have it, tagged with the date 1973.  That says it
had been attested about fifteen years before the 1980s
_Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary_ was published,
and that supplement was included in the compilation of the
_OED_ second edition.  It appears the Oxford lexicographers
don't always look at American dictionaries to see if they've
overlooked any words.  Or maybe they looked at it as an
American barbarism that wasn't fit to be included in the
_OED_.

Maybe sometime in the next ten or twenty years, when the
Oxford updaters have worked through the rest of the last
half of the alphabet and come around to the "C"s, they'll
add "complicit" to the lexicon.

Incidentally, the word "complicit" provides yet another bit
of evidence that the _Merriam-Webster's Unabridged
Dictionary_ on CD ROM has updates in it that were inserted
after it's parent, the _Webster's Third New International
Dictionary_, was published in 1966.  "Complicit" is in the
former, but not in the latter.

Also incidentally, "complice" was a quite new word to me.
It means the same as "accomplice", someone who is complicit.

Strange, then, that my Collins doesn't have it -- I thought they compiled
their database from usage.

Steve Hayes
hayesmstw@hotmail.com
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/7734/stevesig.htm

I looked in my Chambers (1973), and it doesn't have "complicit". It has
"complice", and that definition includes "complicity" as "state of being
an accomplice", and "complexity".