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I've never thought about the definition of when a word was invented. I've just joined Stack Exchange and am wondering how etymologists define first use.
etymnonline dot com has
image (n.) c. 1200
image (v.) late 14c
and
imagine (v.) mid-14c.
That is a gap of 200 years.
I imagine (sic) that people were imagining since very early times and probably talking too.
Do etymologists refer to when a word was first written, rather than when it was first used (spoken)?
It comes down to what qualifies as an attestation. If someone with "street cred" writes an essay for the Sunday paper and says, "I can guarantee you we used [ some word ] when I was a kid in the late 1940s early 1950s to mean such-and-such, and then letters to the editor arrive corroborating that claim, a dictionary might date the origin as "circa 1950" even if the first written attestation did not appear until, say, 1966. It's an editorial decision. For words from the middle ages, how would anyone know?
That said, when there's evidence of, say, a bunch of similarly structured verbs attested uninterrupted from the 9th century through to the 15th century, all going through similar sound changes, but there's one verb of the same ilk that is attested in the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries but unattested in early medieval texts, an etymologist might well posit the unattested form, putting an asterisk in front of it as a sign that it is unattested, but indicating that there's hardly any doubt it did exist.
The historical record of the language is imperfect. Many manuscripts were destroyed, intentionally or unintentionally.
Dates like this refer to the first known instance of a word being used in writing. They are not intended as an indication of when that word (or another word from which it is descended) might have been used for the first time.
The Etymonline entry that you quote gives the first known occurrence in writing of image as a noun (c. 1200) and as a verb (late 14c), and of the related verb imagine (mid-14c). What it does not do is put a date on when the ancestors of those words were used (except in the implied sense that it was before that earliest date).
This is because although we know that the origin of image is Latin imago, and although comparative linguists have good reasons to believe that the Proto-Indo-European root of that word was *aim- (thought to have had the meaning of ‘to copy’), we have no way of dating when words from that root were first uttered, except to say that it happened thousands of years ago.
Dates like these generally refer to written usage since that is generally the only kind of evidence that we have. (Speech by itself doesn't leave documents behind.) So these can be viewed as providing an upper limit to the actual date when a word was first used.
The fact that people have been imagining a long time doesn't mean they were using the word "imagine".
