"More often than not, however, the dates of first record for foreign words borrowed into
English serve to confirm and support the etymology given by the previous editions of the
Dictionary. Take the word meringue, for instance. Despite extensive searches for earlier
examples of the word in English, our first record still comes from the 1706 edition of
Phillips's New World of Words, where it is identified as a word of French origin. The
Second Edition of the OED accordingly gives an etymology from French meringue, but can
find no evidence for its use in French before 1739. Thanks to TLF, we can now trace the
French word back to a cookbook of 1691, nearly twenty years before the first attestation in
English. The further etymology of the word remains as obscure to us as it was to Murray's
team, but we can at least supply a chronology to confirm that the word (and presumably the
confection) came to us from the French."
