How exactly do words become actual words?
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Every word is an “actual word”
If I make up the word “blimpysmeerp” and start using it as a word, it is now a word. I don’t even need anyone else to agree.
Dictionaries are useful for the most common words but they don’t decide what words are, they just find which words people are already using, so by definition there’s always going to be a delay there. And lots of words won’t appear in a dictionary. An obvious example is jargon: dictionaries don’t list every single technical term from every field.
Linguists don’t make any distinction between “real words” and “not real words”. A word is just a grammatical function (which isn’t even that precisely defined, so linguists often talk about morphemes instead
Every word is something that at some point somebody made up and just started saying. They’re all real words
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