Letter #38: How Words Enter the Dictionary

And other musings

Dear reader,

I was sitting at my desk the other day and began thinking of dictionaries. Which, to be fair, is not that particularly out of the ordinary for me, since I’m a complete and utter nerd.

And I started wondering: What is the metric for how many times, and how widely, a word has to be used for it to be added to the dictionary? What constitutes a new word becoming an official new word?

And so I got to looking into it, as usual.

Please Accept Too Many Links About This Topic:

• From Merriam-Webster

• From Smithsonian Magazine

• From the Oxford English Dictionary (OED)

• From NPR

• From Book Riot

I particularly appreciate the phrasing of Dictionary.com’s answer to this question. According to Dictionary.com, “[t]he answer involves one of the most misunderstood things about dictionaries, so let’s set the record straight: a word doesn’t become a “real word” when it’s added to the dictionary. It’s actually the other way around: we add words to the dictionary because they’re real—because they’re really used by real people in the real world” (my emphasis added, n. pg).

There’s a lot more you can go into about the actual how, which the articles above go into in more detail, but how a word get into the dictionary essentially boils down to:

1. Is it being used widely to mean the same thing by a wide audience?

2. Has it been, and is it (probably) going to be, in usage for a solid chunk of time?

Generally, words need to meet those criteria to be considered for entry into the dictionary. From there, lexicographers (dictionary compilers, how cool!) dive into researching the usage of the word to determine if a word should be added or not, how exactly to define it, etc.

As such, dictionaries are never truly finished, as language is constantly evolving. As Ammon Shea states in The Phone Book: The Curious History of the Book That Everyone Uses But No One Reads, “[t]elephone books are, like dictionaries, already out of date the moment they are printed” (n. pg).

I tend to think of dictionaries a little like the way meme culture works on the Internet. Memes are always coming into being and floating around. Then one gets popular and comes into wider and wider use and typically eventually fades into some level of obscurity. (Whether or not it returns to the limelight later is another story entirely!)

The timeframe for words tends to be longer than the general life of a meme, however.

For example, we can look at a word like “ghost.”

Google Ngram, a feature that tracks the usage of terms appearing in books from 1500 to 2019, shows this result for the usage of the word:

Photo credit: Screenshot of the trends graph that appears for the word “ghost” as searched on Google Ngram, with a blue line indicating usage overtime. The highest usage shows around roughly the 1530s-1540s then again about the 1550s-1560s, with two smaller rises again about the 1580s and 1600s-1610s. There is a general decline throughout the 1700s, picking up again about the 1750s and remaining roughly the same until the 1980s, with a steady increase in usage from the 2000s onward until the present.

To my surprise, the graph shows the highest usage around roughly the 1530s-1540s then again about the 1550s-1560s, with two smaller rises again about the 1580s and 1600s-1610s. This generally makes me curious about why the term was far more used at this point in history, which manuscripts the word appears in, what constitutes the frequency, which areas of the world are the manuscripts come from, translations of the same word from other languages, cultural significance, etc.

This graph shows that, the word “ghost” has risen and dropped in popularity over the centuries, but has not appeared to have ever faded entirely out of usage. (I’m curious about that low point around the late 1600s-very early 1700s!)

Here are some links about the many definitions and origins of the word “ghost,” if you’re curious:

• From the OED

• From the Online Etymology Dictionary

And then we have memes.

For example, we can look at something like the “I can has cheezburger?” memes of the 2000s-2010s. These cat images with quirky captions were all over the Internet when I was in middle school to early high school, but faded out of what I would consider the mainstream within a few years.

While the lifespan of the word “ghost” stretched on for considerably longer than the few years the cheezburgerz cat memes did, these are also completely different media (Internet memes vs. words) across different timespans and spaces.

… Still, it is kinda funny seeing the juxtaposition of comparing these two totally different things in Google Trends:

Photo credit: Screenshot of the trends graph that appears for “i can has cheezburger?” and “ghost” as searched on Google Trends, with a blue line indicating the meme’s and a red line indicating the word’s usage overtime.

It’s fascinating to me how small the line for the cat meme looks in comparison to that of the word “ghost.” However, if you’re looking at the entry for just the meme, it looks like there’s more activity, just not in comparison to a literal word:

Photo credit: Screenshot of the trends graph that appears for “i can has cheezburger?” as searched on Google Trends, with a blue line indicating the meme’s usage overtime.

**Note: Based on the way search terms, SEO, and algorithms work, I bet these graphs would be a little different based on if you searched “i can has cheezburger?” vs. “i can haz cheezburgers?” vs. “I Can Has Cheezburger?” and so on. Or if you searched for “Ghost,” as in, the rock band or the 1990 film.

I’m running out of space here, so that might be a deep dive for another day!

“Ghost” (as a verb) may be picking up in usage currently because it acquired an additional meaning relatively more recently. (“Ghosting” typically refers to when someone begins not responding to calls/messages without explanation or warning.)

Regardless, both examples give us a brief glimpse into history, however fleeting or lasting. And that’s part of what I love about both memes and words.

It’s nice to watch compilations of memes and old videos (typically Vines and snippets of other videos) to reminisce. It’s neat to be able to flip through dictionaries or encyclopedias from years past and see which words were being used at that time and which words had been, or were being, phased out. (At least in print.)

Small Secret (shhh): This is part of why I read the forewords to books, including dictionaries! You’ll never know what inside information the editor(s) might divulge there!

Related Videos of Interest:

• Interested in learning? I’d suggest Tom Scott’s videos! He gives easily digestible bits of knowledge about all sorts of things and has an incredible backlog of videos from his 10+ years of making educational videos on YouTube.

  • If you’re just starting out with his videos and you like my general word nerdery, I’d suggest his videos on how languages take words from each other or how many languages there are or maybe even the pronunciation of GIF.

• I stumbled across the channel RobWords on YouTube a little more recently and have found these videos super interesting: the origins of the names of months or the origins of the alphabet.

That’s it for now!

Hope you have a lovely rest of your day and, as always, happy reading!

Quotes of the Week:

1. “Dictionaries are the record of how people are already using the language, not providers of words for us to start using.”

-Gretchen McCulloch, Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language

Fun Fact: After looking up the book referenced here, I learned that Gretchen McCullough and Lauren Gawne also host a podcast called Lingthusiasm (with an accompanying Substack that looks wonderful so far!). I’ve just added a new book, pod, and newsletter to be to read and listened to!

2. “As a lexicographer friend once confided over sushi, the dictionary takes its cues from use: If writers don’t change things, the dictionary doesn’t change things.”
   -Benjamin Dreyer, Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

Works Cited (MLA 9th Edition)

Baron, Melissa. “How Are Words Added to the Dictionary?” BOOK RIOT, Riot New Media Group, 23 Oct. 2019, bookriot.com/how-are-words-added-to-the-dictionary/.

Dryer, Benjamin. “Dreyer’s English Quotes.” Goodreads, Goodreads, Inc., www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/62095489-dreyer-s-english-an-utterly-correct-guide-to-clarity-and-style. Accessed 19 Nov. 2023.

“How New Words Get Added to Dictionary.Com-and How the Dictionary Works.” Dictionary.Com, Dictionary.com, 12 May 2023, www.dictionary.com/e/getting-words-into-dictionaries/.

Lewis, Danny. “Here’s How the Oxford English Dictionary Chooses New Words.” Smithsonian.Com, Smithsonian Institution, 13 Sept. 2016, www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/heres-how-oxford-english-dictionary-chooses-new-words-180960423/#:~:text=“Anything%20new%20that%20goes%20into,new%20words%20become%20frequently%20used.

McCullouch, Gretchen. “Because Internet Quotes.” Goodreads, Goodreads, Inc., www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/58531406-because-internet-understanding-the-new-rules-of-language. Accessed 19 Nov. 2023.

Shea, Ammon. “The Phone Book Quotes.” Goodreads, Goodreads, Inc., https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/13698572-the-phone-book-the-curious-history-of-the-book-that-everyone-uses-but-n. Accessed 19 Nov. 2023.

Sokolowski, Peter. “How a Word Gets into the Dictionary (Video).” Merriam-Webster, Merriam-Webster, www.merriam-webster.com/video/how-a-word-gets-into-the-dictionary#:~:text=Whatever%20the%20speed%2C%20the%20process,of%20the%20language%20in%20use. Accessed 19 Nov. 2023.