Words come and go over time. But at some point, someone somewhere coins a word.
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How does that word blossom from a few people using it, to being a word on everyone’s tongue and widely-used, to the extent of earning a spot in the dictionary?
Do the editors sit around and decide on their own? Do they accept input from the general public, i.e., people make nominations for new entries?
How about the opposite, when it comes to removing words?
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I remember when I was a kid I saw and TV ad that was basically some brand trying to create a new word to put on the dictionary. I dont recall which word was it but I remember them being successfull. They were just asking for the people to sign a petition proving the word was real and had real meaning. They eventually got a big number of signatures and it eventually ended up on the dictionary. This was in my country tho (Portugal), might have a different process in other countries.
Dictionary writers research how words are being used and by who. They do this by scnning thousands of pages, websites, books, social webs, etc, to see who’s using a turn of phrase or a new word. An example is Steven Colbert and the word “Truthiness”. He coined the word in a broadcast that was seen in the US and UK, then so many people started using it it’s now in the dictionary.
The Simpons created the words “embiggen” and “cromulent” in pretty much the same way.
Dictionaries have editors and authors to suggest, assess and decide on new words and their definitions.
There’s no “official” dictionary on English, different publishers have different words, and add different new words.
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(In English at least) there is no centralized authority to adjudicate this stuff. It is kind of a common agreement to reference dictionaries, with some being more “credible” than others. The writers/editors of the dictionaries sometimes view themselves as guardians of the lexicon. There are sometimes competing schools of thought on this – whether their job is to guide and enforce existing rules, or to capture the language as presently used.
So anyways, these folks look at how words are used and when it reaches some kind of threshold which is ill defined, they decide to add it.
Language is always a hot topic and is fraught with pitfalls. Does academics using a word give it more legitimacy as opposed to music artists, teenagers, or the lower socio-economic strata? If it’s an existing word with a new meaning, should that be easier to add than a brand new word. A word life selfie has been introduced in the last couple of decades, and fills a lexical need for a thing that now needs a name, but how about a phrase like “on fleek” – is it a genuine enduring contribution, or a passing fad? Does it add something new? Then you have words with sometimes divisive and/or political baggage like pork or woke. How quickly should we add those to the dictionary?
Anyways, it’s group of editors who make these decisions.
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The rule for most dictionaries is if a word is in widespread use.
An example would be a word like “meme”. Coined by Richard Dawkins in “The Selfish Gene”. Just being included in that book wasn’t enough but these days everyone on the internet knows what a meme is. So while it was first used in 1976, dictionaries didn’t start to include it until the 90s.
Of course this can be subjective. Does a single publication using a word a lot count? Do we include very local regional slang? And of course, it will only be words that the people who write the dictionary have heard of.
I forget which dictionary it was, but I was reading the front matter of one years ago that said if I word was used in 3 different mainstream publications they would include it in their dictionary
The words need to be used in print in contexts where the reader is assumed to understand what they mean. Dictionary editors keep records of written citations. When it becomes clear that a word has entered common discourse, it gets added.
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