Word Up: Merriam-Webster deserves props for latest additions

Kirk Baird

Monday, July 14, 2003 | 8:48 a.m.

Dot-commer. Botox. Mockumentary. Hip-hopper. LASIK. Brewski. Viagra.

And Shakespeare is difficult?

It's safe to say that if the Bard were to be magically transported into the 21st century, he would be as ill-at-ease with today's English language as are many high school students when they read "Hamlet."

That is, unless he had the just-released Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary. The Eleventh Edition of the top-selling dictionary features the above words and thousands of more new terms, slang and phrases that have become part of the lexicon 24-7.

Among some of the new additions:

Then there are those words already in the dictionary which have taken on additional meanings.

The process for discovering these new terms and meanings is actually fairly simple, say those who compiled the new dictionary.

Several editors at Merriam-Webster spend much of their time scouring newspapers, magazines and even food labels in search of new entries into the English language. When they discover a word, phrase or usage that catches their attention, they underline it.

"It becomes second nature," Kathleen Doherty, associate editor of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, said in a phone interview from Springfield, Mass. "So when you're reading for pleasure outside of work, you find yourself marking interesting words. It's insidious, actually."

Each word underlined is written on a 3-by-5-inch card and is filed away, along with an example from the publication in which it was used. The words are also entered into a computer for additional storage.

So far there are 15.5 million files with more than 75 million words.

"So when we decide to use a word in print, we have to have a lot of examples to back it up," Doherty said.

The mammoth collection dates to 1790, when Noah Webster himself began to assemble the terms to help establish an American language separate from the language used in Great Britain.

The first Collegiate Dictionary was published nearly a century later and undergoes a major update once a decade, which is the case for this year's edition, the 11th overall, with minor additions made in between.

For the latest version, 10,000 new words were included, along with 100,000 new meanings and revisions of its 225,000 definitions.

All of those additions, Doherty said, had to meet certain criteria, the biggest being the word must be reasonably well known.

Which, for example, is why headbanger (a musician who performs hard rock) was included, and not bling (or bling bling, slang for shiny, garish jewelry).

According to the dictionary, headbanger has been around since since 1979. But bling, Doherty said, has only been traced back to 2000.

Because of its relative infancy to the language, Doherty said that bling is often still placed in quotations in such publications as Vibe and Rolling Stone -- which is usually a sure sign that these words have not become mainstream and are not ready to be officially included into the language.

"They're in circulation and in use -- that's how we determine new words of new meanings of established words," Doherty said. "It has to be used by a wide range of people and in a wide range of things. At that point people will be looking it up in the dictionary, so it better be in there. But if the word is discreet and used by a few people, it wouldn't be in there."

For the language purists who find it irritating to have McJob (a low-paying job that requires little skill and provides little opportunity for advancement) and Frankenfood (genetically engineered food) recognized by Merriam-Webster, perhaps you should just chill, said John Irsfeld, chairman of the English department of University Nevada, Las Vegas.

Irsfeld still remembers when he was in elementary school and the teacher would correct he and the class for using "ain't."

"She would say, 'There's no such word as "ain't." ' And we would look at each other and say, 'That ain't right 'cause we just heard it at recess,' " Irsfeld said.

Now, of course, ain't is in the dictionary as a contraction of are not, along with recent additions such as power walk, rug rat, olestra and identity theft.

"A lot of people resist new words even though they're going to come no matter what we do," Irsfeld said. "But English doesn't belong to Merriam-Webster and it doesn't belong to English professors. It belongs to the people who speak English and they're going to do what they're going to do."