Long before Oxford Dictionaries named the tears-of-joy emoji 2015’s “word” of the year, the language grumps were grumbling about the downfall of the written word.
had recently sanctioned “fleek” and “yaaas” — three a’s. Merriam-Webster had officially welcomed “wtf” and “nsfw” into its fold. “Bae” and “bezzy,” “YOLO” and “wahh,” “fur baby” and “mkay” — hardly a month goes by without one of the world’s most reputable dictionaries trumpeting some tidbit of Internet slang.
“Don’t get butthurt about our bants!” reads a recent news release from Oxford Dictionaries — the same Oxford Dictionaries that traces its roots back to the parlors of London intellectuals in the 19th century.
Dictionaries have always added new words, of course; if they didn’t, they’d be useless. But skeptical philologists are correct in observing that the pace has gotten faster, the incubation times shorter and the neologisms frequently more “ridic.”
As always, you can blame the Internet.
“The lifecycles of words are infinite,” said Katherine Martin, the head of U.S. dictionaries at Oxford University Press. “But the cycle has changed, and it’s now quite quick.”
We’ve long known, of course, that the Internet and the mess of technologies we use to access it shape the way we communicate. Less discussed, but equally important, is how the Internet has changed the institutions documenting, codifying and endorsing the language.
Historically, dictionaries have been written by teams of people called lexicographers, who pore over thousands of pages of printed materials looking for new words (and new uses of old ones). Today, lexicographers still define words, of course — they just have totally different methods for going about it.
Most of the major dictionaries, including Oxford, Merriam-Webster and , subscribe to data services that bundle news articles, blogs posts, forum updates, status messages, site comments and a whole lot of other data streams into a massive dump that basically sums up how the Internet’s talking. At Oxford Dictionaries, Martin explains, that back-end technology includes a tool that graphs how many times a new word has been used, and over what period: if it spikes, it’s a meme; if it fizzles, it’s a stunt; if it goes up and stays up, it might just be worth adding to the “definitive record of the English language.”
There are other listening posts, too. At Merriam-Webster, lexicographers keep a close eye on what trends in user searches. At , they scrutinize the searches that turn up a “Did you misspell that?” page: Often, said Jane Solomon, a lexicographer, those misspellings are actually new words. And because online editions have no space constraints or unwieldy publishing schedules, there’s little cost to adding them.
“Words are simply more discoverable now,” Solomon said. “Words that pop up in small communities, or among friends on forums, are now publicly available to lexicographers.”
The looming issue for dictionaries is whether those words, once added to the dictionary, will ever be discoverable to users.
The dictionary industry has not been immune to greater shake-ups across the publishing world. Sales of reference books plummeted 37 percent between 2007 and 2014, the earliest and most dramatic downturn in the nonfiction category. Online, even the best-established dictionaries have watched upstart Urban Dictionary and behemoth Google claw into their territory.
The vast majority of dictionary-users today don’t crack open the latest Merriam-Webster, or even type into their address bar, but simply Google the meaning of the word they want. Since August 2013, when Google’s OneBox stopped linking to dictionary sites, the search engine has handily trapped word-searchers within its own, proprietary web: Search “define” and any English word, and it will surface a definition on the top of the results page, without the need to ever actually click.
