Error

In the course of Saturday evening's game of Scrabble, I used the word 'segue' which I thought, rather vaguely, was something to do with dancing. I may have conflated it with 'sashay'. BH, being rather more good natured and rather less competitive about these things than FIL, did not challenge. I did, however, check after the game, to find that neither 'segue' nor 'seague' was to be found in any of our Oxford Dictionaries. Neither the real thing from 1910, the Shorter from 1950 or the Concise from 1960. Nor can I turn the word up in any of the French dictionaries that I checked.

So on any of the various dictionary rules that we play under, the word would have been disallowed, converting BH's win by a short head to a win by a head. But at least the actual result is not disturbed.

I then thought to ask Cortana, to find that she knows all about the shorter spelling and that we even have a Wikipedia entry for it. An entry which claims the Shorter of 2007 as its authority. A word which means a smooth or gliding transition from one place in the music to another, or from one place in the television programme or film to another. A word which might be extended to application to dance, in the sense of a gliding transition from one place in one dance to another place in another. Something which was occasionally to be seen in the dance halls of my youth.

In my defence, I still think it odd that a word which now seems to be well established had no prior life in our OED, a prior life in which, perhaps, it meant something slightly different, perhaps a smooth transition from one sort of sabre blow to another sort of blow in the heat of the cavalry action at Waterloo. A technical, military sort of term.

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segue.