Smitha Mundasad, “Babies’ brains to be mapped in the womb and after birth“, BBC News 4/9/2013:

By the time a baby takes its first breath many of the key pathways between nerves have already been made.

And some of these will help determine how a baby thinks or sees the world, and may have a role to play in the development of conditions such as autism, scientists say.

But how this rich neural network assembles in the baby before birth is relatively unchartered territory.

In 1921, the OED glossed uncharted as “Of which there is not map or chart. (Common in recent use.)”, with the earliest substantive citation as

1895 Pop. Sci. Monthly July 404 To establish the latitude and longitude of uncharted places.

And a check with the Google Ngram viewer suggests that the OED editor who wrote that entry got it exactly right, at least if 0.6 per million counts as “common”.

(…)

In any case, “unchartered territory” is fairly common. The current Google News index finds 121 examples, compared to 470 for “uncharted territory”. More.

See: Language Log

Subscribe to the translation news daily digest here. See more translation news.