contaminationn.

1599 A. M. tr. O. Gaebelkhover Bk. Physicke 296/1 If so be anye man hadde anye Contamination in his bodye.

1806 Med. & Physical Jrnl. 15 501 The contamination of these glands.

1871 J. Tyndall Fragm. Sci. (ed. 6) I. v. 174 No surface contamination can reach the water.

1913 E. Rutherford Radioactive Substances iii. 112 All sources of active matter should be kept in sealed vessels, in order to avoid possible radio-active contamination.

1950 S. Glasstone Sourcebk. Atomic Energy xviii. 518/1 A problem which radiochemical investigations have..is that of preventing contamination of both equipment and personnel.

1620 Bp. J. Hall Honor Married Clergie i. iv. 23 What was hee that accused Marriage..of Contamination with carnall concupiscence.

1792 J. Almon Anecd. Life W. Pitt (octavo ed.) III. xliv. 195 Such a mode of warfare was..a contamination, a pollution of our national character.

1844 C. J. Lever Tom Burke I. xxx. 212 That dreadful man, whose very presence is contamination.

1877 Encycl. Brit. VII. 411/2 The Roman versions were probably terser than their originals, which they often altered by the process called contamination.

1909 Nation (N.Y.) 22 Apr. 407/2 In ‘All Fools’, for example, we have a ‘contamination’, to use the technical term, of the ‘Heautontimoroumenos’ and the ‘Adelphi’, plus a sub-plot of Chapman's own invention.

1888 H. A. Strong tr. H. Paul Princ. Hist. Lang. 160 By ‘contamination’ I understand the process by which synonymous forms of expression force themselves simultaneously into consciousness, so that neither of the two makes its influence felt simply and purely: a new form arises in which elements of the one mingle with elements of the other.

1888 H. A. Strong tr. H. Paul Princ. Hist. Lang. 160 Contamination manifests itself partly in the phonetic form of single words, partly in their syntactical combination.

1890 H. A. Strong et al. Introd. Study Hist. Lang. 142 We may lay it down that for analogy we must demand a sufficient number of examples on which to base a rule; while for contamination, a single form or construction may suffice.

1901 H. Oertel Lect. Study Lang. 174 The structure of grammatical paradigms does not escape contamination.

1947 E. H. Sturtevant Introd. Ling. Sci. xi. 110 Momentary hesitation between two possible linguistic responses is extremely common, and not infrequently it leads to a mingling of the two. Instances are..ruvershoes (rubbers × overshoes)... We call this process contamination.

1968 Language 44 475 Contamination is taken to be the process by which two linguistic forms..are crossed to produce a single new form.

1913 F. W. Hall Compan. Classical Texts 130 The problem of relationship [of MSS.] is often rendered exceedingly complex by the tendency which is variously described as ‘contamination’, ‘mixture’, or ‘eclectic fusion’ of the different groups.

1960 G. Kane Piers Plowman: A Version 21 Of the seventeen manuscripts twelve agree, apart from physical imperfections and two major contaminations.