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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(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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