hobbit, including: Hooker fails to find any of them "an unambiguous source for the Hobbits of Middle-earth". In the December 2003 Oxford English Dictionary newsletter, the following appears: "4. hobbit — J. R. R. Tolkien modestly claimed not to have coined this word, although the Supplement to the OED credited him with the invention of it in the absence of further evidence. It seems, however, that Tolkien was right to be cautious. It has since turned up in one of those 19th-century folklore journals, in a list of long-forgotten words for fairy-folk or little people. It seems likely that Tolkien, with his interest in folklore, read this and subconsciously registered the name, reviving it many years later in his most famous character. [Editor's note: although revision of the OED's entry for hobbit will of course take this evidence for earlier use into account, it does not yet appear in the online version of the entry.]" As of 8 November 2012 the entry "has not yet been fully updated" in the OED Online version September 2012. Proprietary status In 1968 United Artists acquired film and related merchandising rights to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Saul Zaentz bought the merchandising rights in 1976, vested in the Saul Zaentz Company (SZC; trade name "Middle-earth Enterprises", formerly "Tolkien Enterprises"). SZC registered trademarks in various product categories for names related to elements of the novels. The 1970s role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons has humanoid races approximating Tolkien's. The halfling race was called "hobbit" until changed after a 1977 lawsuit by Tolkien Enterprises in the run-up to the release of the animated film The Lord of the Rings. For the same reason, Dungeons & Dragons "ents" were renamed treants; on the other hand elf, orc, and dwarf races were not renamed. Although the word halfling is used in The Lord of the Rings as an exonym of hobbit, it is not proprietary to Tolkien and an earlier published citation in the OED is from The Sword of Rhiannon. Later fantasy works also used halfling in a similar sense. In 2008 SZC won a World Intellectual Property Organization case against a cybersquatter for control of the domain name and typosquat . In 2012 Warner Bros. released The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey in association with SZC. To coincide with the release, a New Zealand scientist planned a public lecture on Homo floresiensis, an extinct human-like