New Words

How do they get into the Oxford English Dictionary?

Graeme Diamond is a member of the team responsible for recording and drafting new words for the Oxford English Dictionary. He explains the process of how a word appearing in your newspaper today finds its way into an Oxford English Dictionary

New words in the Oxford English Dictionary

Imagine that you are reading your favourite newspaper over breakfast. The news column tells you that new "e-tailers" have underestimated the time it takes to build a loyal customer base. You discover that the term is an abbreviation of "electronic retailer".

It is very likely that this word will have been picked up by the OED's Reading Programme, a large ongoing project employing around fifty readers. All types of contemporary printed material are looked at - novels, television scripts, song lyrics, and so on, as well as newspapers and magazines - and searched for entirely new words, or interesting new uses of existing words. The findings of the Reading Programme are stored in a vast searchable electronic database of quotation material called 'Incomings'.

In one of my regular analyses of the Incomings database, I see that "e-tailer" has appeared several times in recent publications. I note the word for further investigation, and perhaps for eventual inclusion in the Dictionary.

A single appearance (or even several clustered appearances) of a word in print is not a guarantee that it will be included in the OED: the word may enjoy a brief flurry of popularity before disappearing for ever. Oxford Dictionaries record how the English language is used by a large number of people over a reasonable period of time, and many "coinages" never attain any kind of currency. If "e-tailer" proves to be a useful abbreviation for a company selling through electronic media, it will be taken up by other writers, and usage and understanding of the term will spread.

So researching a new word also involves looking for evidence beyond the Incomings database, to gain a rounded picture of the currency the word enjoys. Sources such as Internet databases, subject-specific glossaries, and the Dictionary's paper files (which include thousands of contributions from members of the public from throughout the English-speaking world) are searched for occurrences of "e-tailer". I am interested not only in the frequency of occurrences, but also in the time-span and variety of sources in which they appear. The decision on whether to draft a word for inclusion does not rest with me (as the editor responsible for the word), but depends upon the weight of the evidence gathered. A rule of thumb is that any word can be included which appears five times, in five different printed sources, over a period of five years.

The "five-year" aspect of the rule can result in a timelag between the first use of a word and its first appearance in the Dictionary; but it also ensures that a great deal of care is taken in recording the true nature of the word. However it is often clear long before the five-year period is up that a word is generally current; in such cases we include the word as quickly as possible.

Perhaps surprisingly, in the case of "e-tailer" the five-year rule has worked well. My researches on the internet have turned up a use of the word in 1995; and there are more than twenty-five uses, from over fifteen different sources, on Incomings alone. "E-tailer" is therefore "draftworthy", and I can set about assembling an entry.

The Oxford English Dictionary provides as exhaustive a picture as possible of each of the words it contains. In drafting a new entry for the Dictionary, I have to be as rigorous with the documentation and other aspects of the entry as the scholars and philologists who contributed to the Dictionary over past decades. It is not simply a case of answering the question "what does this word mean?" - although obviously I must do that: "e-tailer" must be also considered from several other points of view.

Pronunciation I give a British and an American pronunciation for each new word; were "e-tailer" a word specific to another English-speaking country, I would give the pronunciation used in that area as well. Pronunciations are given in the International Phonetic Alphabet.

Forms Words can appear in a number of different forms. This is particularly true of new words, where a "standard" form has yet to crystallize. In the evidence for "e-tailer", the forms "e-tailer", "E-tailer", "etailer", and "eTailer" are all used. I list them all, not only for the convenience of a person interested in this word, but also so that a user of the Internet version of the Dictionary (www.oed.com) is able to find the entry via whichever form of the word they type into the search box.

Etymology "E-tailer" is quite interesting, as the "e-" prefix (for "electronic", as in "e-mail") replaces an element of the word "retailer" rather than simply being tacked on to the start of the word (as in "e-mail", "e-commerce", and so on). My etymology reads: [ e- (in ELECTRONIC a., after E-MAIL n.) + -tailer (in RETAILER n.).]

Definition What is an e-tailer? My definition must convey this information clearly, concisely, unambiguously, and in language that is itself transparent. Bearing in mind the word's origin as an abbreviation of "electronic retailer", my draft definition reads:

An organization or individual selling products or services through electronic media, esp. the Internet.

Although most e-tailers are companies, I use the wording "organization or individual" to cover non-corporate vendors who might fall under the general label "e-tailer". Similarly, although the Internet is by far the most common medium for electronic retailing, there are other media (e-mail and so on) which e-tailers might utilise, making it safer in terms of definition to use the clause "electronic media, esp. the Internet".

Quotations Finally I must select from the available evidence some illustrative quotations, showing the word in use over a representative time-span. In this case I choose quotations from 1995 (the earliest available quotation is always used in the entry), 1997, and 2000. To use any more quotations than this would be to over-elaborate on a word with a short history and only one meaning.

Once drafted, the entry for "e-tailer" will undergo several further editorial passes, including one by an etymologist, before becoming one of the many thousands of new words waiting in the wings to become part of the Oxford English Dictionary.

How do new words enter other Oxford dictionaries?

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