Noun

(en noun)

A solemn pledge or promise to a god, king, or another person, to attest to the truth of a statement or contract

* 1924 , Aristotle, Metaphysics , Translated by W. D. Ross. Nashotah, Wisconsin, USA: The Classical Library, 2001. Available at: . Book 1, Part 3.

for they made Ocean and Tethys the parents of creation, and described the oath of the gods as being by water,

The affirmed statement or promise accepted as equivalent to an oath .

A light or insulting use of a solemn pledge or promise to a god, king or another person, to attest to the truth of a statement or contract the name of a deity in a profanity, as in swearing oaths .

* {{quote-magazine, date=2013-06-14, author= Sam Leith

, volume=189, issue=1, page=37, magazine=(The Guardian Weekly) , title= Where the profound meets the profane , passage=Swearing doesn't just mean what we now understand by "dirty words". It is entwined, in social and linguistic history, with the other sort of swearing: vows and oaths'. Consider for a moment the origins of almost any word we have for bad language – "profanity", "curses", "' oaths " and "swearing" itself.}}

A curse.

(legal) An affirmation of the truth of a statement.

Noun

(Attested language) (en noun)

A thing that serves to bear witness, confirm, authenticate, validation, verification, documentation.

A confirmation or authentication.

(business, finance) The process, performed by accountants or auditors, of providing independent opinion on published financial and other business information of a business, public agency, or other organization.

(linguistics, of a language or word) An appearance in print or otherwise recorded on a permanent medium.

* 1997 , Roger Lass, Historical Linguistics and Language Change , page 23,

So something must have been developing over long periods empty of attestation ; and whatever it was, it must (by principles to be discussed in the next section) have been a language of the usual kind.

* 2009 , Ingo Plag, Maria Braun, Sabine Lappe, Mareile Schramm, Introduction to English Linguistics , page 110,

For each word, the date of its first attestation in the English language, as documented in the Oxford English Dictionary'', and its frequency of occurrence in the ''British National Corpus are given.

* 2010 , Kathryn Allan, Tracing metonymic polysemy through time: MATERIAL FOR OBJECT mappings in the OED'', Margaret E. Winters, Heli Tissari, Kathryn Allan (editors), ''Historical Cognitive Linguistics , page 176,

Furthermore, the first attestations' given in the ''OED'' are not always the earliest '''attestations''' in print; since the first edition was finished in 1928, many earlier and later examples have been identified, and these will be incorporated into the third edition, currently underway (see Durkin 2002 for a discussion of how much this is likely to change the dates of '''attestation in the ''OED as a whole).