Sharon is another word for sharn. Alas, there is no historic usage of Tracy in English. A sharnbud, a word attested by Aelfric 1000 years ago, and still being used 300 years ago, is a dung-beetle or scarab. A sharnpenny changed hands as a token of the benefit someone got, manure-wise, from having cattle enclosed on the land.
It takes 60 million words to explain, source, etymologise and exemplify meanings and changes of meaning of the half a million words in the Oxford English Dictionary. All one can say is "Mirabundous!" a word probably only used once, by Motteaux, translator of Rabelais, and yes counsellor, it means wonderful.
The first example of counsellor in the sense of one who counsels or advises dates from 1225, the latest, in the sense of a British Embassy rank, dates from John Le Carre's A Small Town In Germany in 1968. You can surf this CD-rom as happily as you can surf the net, but with more profit and more certainty that the facts are right. After all, the OED has the last word on the meaning of a word, as well as the first word, and all the words in between.
PG Wodehouse provides the authority for usage in 1520 cases, from A as in AWOL (Mating Season) to avenue (Indiscr. Archie), and that's just the A strain. The Guardian (this paper, the Guardian of Frankfort Kentucky, the San Francisco Bay Guardian and indeed a 17th century predecessor) is responsible for 6217 entries, one of them adamsite, an arsenical compound for chemical warfare. Enter the Waugh zone and discover not just the brothers Evelyn and Alec, but also E Waugh of Lanc. Life (1857) providing authority for dialect uses of anent, bagging and bang. A shandrydan is a chaise with a hood, or possibly just an old fashioned vehicle (according to Blackwoods Magazine and the famous Elinor Glyn, the notorious one with whom you would sin on a tiger skin, or prefer to err on some other fur). A shandygaff, on the other hand, is a mixture of beer and ginger beer, and occurs in Tom Brown's Schooldays. It's served in a glass, and the uses that have been attached to the word vitreous would make your eyes glaze over. Ananthous, another useful word for when the florist lets you down, means destitute of flowers.
You can search by word, source, author or date; you can scroll down the A-list or the S-list or 24 other lists of the alphabet, pausing where you wist. On wist (v) the disc shut down, and demanded to be uninstalled and rebooted, perhaps because it objected to a deliberate archaism, used ignorantly to boot (wist means caused to know, informed).
A book wouldn't have closed itself, but there are at least 24 volumes in the printed OED, and you can't slip them into a briefcase and still have room for your mobile, tape-recorder and your sandwiches. You need Windows 95, 98 or NT4, and £175 plus Vat which works out at more than 28 encyclopaedic word-histories for each pennyworth. Mirabundous, or what?
