New Words
How do they get into other Oxford dictionaries?
The OED new words team is a resource shared by
the whole Dictionary Department. Catherine Soanes describes how new words get
into other Oxford dictionaries.
Every year we publish new editions of one or more of our dictionaries. Nearly
all of these will include new words that have been identified by Graeme and
the rest of the OED team, or which we have spotted in our daily lives.
New words such as cybersquatting [the registering of well-known names as Internet
domain names, in the hope of selling them to the owner at a profit], wakeboarding
[the sport of riding on a short, wide board resembling a surfboard while being
towed behind a motor boat], and Frankenfood [a derogatory term for a food that
contains genetically modified ingredients] often attract a lot of attention
in the media. Some people love them, while others may feel that they are unwelcome
intrusions into the language. However, language is constantly changing and it's
our job to reflect this. Fast-developing technologies such as computing, the
Internet, and mobile phones are always generating new vocabulary; activities
like cooking and keeping fit are enjoying renewed popularity, words from all
over the English-speaking world ('World English') are being noticed, and of
course people are always coming up with new slang.
Even if a new word is not familiar to you we will have found enough evidence
of its use to justify putting it in one of our dictionaries. Graeme and his
colleagues prepare helpful lists of new terms which have recently enjoyed a
high profile or come up frequently in the Incomings database. I choose potential
candidates for inclusion from these lists, and check to see how many examples
of the word there are in our databases.
Obviously different dictionaries contain different numbers of new words. The
New Oxford Dictionary of English included thousands of terms that had
not appeared in any of our dictionaries when it was first published in 1998,
while a smaller work such as the Oxford Compact English Dictionary
would have a hundred or so.
Back to New Words
Bubbling Under: words not yet in an Oxford dictionary
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