the words "girlfriend" and "boyfriend"

My Oxford Universal Dictionary, Third Edition (1944), does no yet recognize those words. My Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary (1966) lists them. Because Webster's has always been quicker to pick up Americanisms and neologisms than Oxford has, this one fact is not entirely conclusive.

However, since most of what we tend to think of as "teenage culture" was spawned in the 1950s in the USA, in my opinion these two words were almost certain to have been coined in the period between 1945 and 1955. As for a book on the subject, look for something that covers the whole rise of teenagers as a marketing and pop culture phenomenon.

thanks!

how many dictionaries do you own? i have a hobson-jobson and a rhyming one and foreign but i find the idea of buying more than one just plain english-language dictionary kind of hard to justify to myself |: