Words

oneiromancy, n.

VLADIMIR NABOKOV would have been 100 today. As Anthony Burgess notes in One Man's Chorus, Nabokov's Lolita is "as much about a love affair with the OED as a passion for a nymphet".

The OED has only four citations from him - none from Lolita. Will the new edition make amends? In an extra chapter of Speak, Memory, Nabokov himself reviews the memoir and says, "at the oneiromancy and mythogeny of psychoanalysis Nabokov has been poking rude fun since the Twenties". Greek for prophecy and dreams, it is a 1665 word, from the Dean of Ely's study of vulgarity: "These rude observations were at last licked into an Art (Physical Oneiromancy) in which Physicians from a consideration of the dreams proceeded to a Crisis of the disposition of the person."