Many dictionaries provide dates of first usage but most stubbornly remain sorted alphabetically. Is there a facility or reference that orders common English words by how old they are?
A dictionary that tried that scheme would be unusable. There’s be no way of finding a word without some very extensive cross referencing that would make it very difficult to find a specific word.
A printed dictionary would be unusable. A software dictionary with multiple sort options could do this and still be usable.
it would need an index.
I was certainly thinking more of an online resource.
But, while it’s true such a printed reference would be useless for how we use a normal dictionary, it would support a narrow set of uses unsupported by a normal reference.
We don’t know when most words emerged. The best we can do is comment on their earliest appearance in literature, which doesn’t really tell us how old it is - it could have been used in conversation hundreds of years before its appearance in written works. And upon recovering new archaeological evidence I imagine this gets revised quite often.
Seriously interested? Join and inquire at a site called Wordorigins.org Discussion Forums.
We have this thing now called “the Internet”, you may have heard of it…
Sorry, too snarky. I agree that this would be near-useless for a print dictionary, but there’s no reason a website couldn’t provide a list of words sorted this way with a search box attached.
And now that I’m thinking of it, it really is a good idea. There will probably be a lot of “unknowns” though, I wager.