a native or inhabitant of Earth
OED has evidence from the sixteenth century for the sense ‘an inhabitant of the earth, in contrast to Heaven’
The last time the great comet was seen by us earthlings is said to be three hundred years ago.
In Neptune I a story gat Few earthlings would indorse: Men treat their bodies well as that Of any blooded horse.
You earthlings debate as to the existence or non-existence of Hell and there it is, staring you in the face all the time.
The intelligence of Martians, if there be any, must be far in advance of that of earthlings.
Hinged robots of crude manlike appearance were familiar enough, but never had Earthling eyes lain on one like this.
There’d been Earthling girls; and not a few Khazaki women had been intrigued by the big Terrestrial.
Advance units of the Martian Imperial Commandos had already obliterated Earthling installations on the Earthling moon. The Commando rocket batteries, firing from the moon, were now giving every major city a taste of hell.
I suspect that the character’s remote quality—a sort of loneliness because he is different from the rest of the Earthling crew—makes the kids react.
Earthlings had had to struggle and experiment for thousands of years to reach a level of comfort these people achieved almost without thinking.
The dog Laika has been shot into the cosmic void. A good dog, a Russian, an Earthling.
You and I will be collecting Anunna! We will have no interest in Earthlings like Barney and his daughters.
Furthermore, I did not know if an un-Earthling had ever previously been encountered, but that did not mean much; you can trust any branch of the service above a certain level of rank to keep its secrets.
According to everything I see and read on this world, one word seems to prey on the minds of most Earthlings; sex. Certainly my editorial droids seem to spend a lot of time discussing the topic, hence this special sex-themed prog.
The newcomers spared a few startled glances at them: You had to look fairly closely to see that they weren’t common garden-variety Caucasoid Earthlings.
antedating 1858
Fayetteville (N. Carolina) Observer
The OED entry was revised in Dec. 2010, discriminating between the sense of an inhabitant of earth rather than heaven (earliest cite 1593), and the SF sense of an inhabitant of earth rather than another planet (earliest cite 1858)
Last modified 2021-04-15 11:16:21
In the compilation of some
entries, HDSF has drawn extensively on corresponding entries
in OED.