"W00t," "Sexting" Now Officially Real Words

A few weeks ago I did a profile of Webster's Third New International, the most controversial dictionary of the twentieth century.

In this weekend's New York Times Book Review, Geoff Nunberg — a linguist at Berkeley, and one of the few academic linguists who writes well for a lay audience — has his own profile on Webster's Third. The whole thing is worth reading, but he has some particularly good material on a topic of perennial interest, how new words get into "the dictionary":

In retrospect, in fact, the Third seems downright fusty. Word harvesting in Gove’s time hadn’t changed since Samuel Johnson, with readers patiently culling citations from printed works. Now the Internet puts tens of thousands of new words at the lexicographer’s fingertips, the great majority of them technical terms, media stunt words like “Brangelina” and “sexploits,” or what Dr. Johnson would have called the “fugitive cant” of chat rooms, tweets and social networks (think of “meep” and “w00t”). And modern dictionaries don’t keep words waiting in the vestibule long. Over the last year the Oxford English Dictionary has inducted “wassup,” “BFF” and “muffin top” (of the abdominal, not the culinary, variety). The new Chambers Dictionary includes “freegan” and “geek chic,” and Merriam-­Webster has recently added “staycation.” Not that lexicographers will include any word that swims into their ken: so far they’ve drawn the line at “refudiate,” though the editors of the Oxford American chose it for their 2010 Word of the Year. But nowadays the dictionary is about as hard to get into as Sam’s Club.

A lot of these items will expire before your hamster does. But there’s little need for a bouncer at the door once dictionaries go online, where space is effectively limitless. And one can make room in print editions by tossing out last season’s fads, like “yadda, yadda” and “Monicagate,” both of which were proffered as evidence of the up-to-­dateness of the Encarta World English Dictionary when it was published in 1999. (Though it was perhaps rash for the Oxford Concise to squeeze in “jeggings” and “mankini” by dropping “cassette tape,” a word that may yet require elucidation for antiquarians poring over early issues of Rolling Stone.)

Nunberg goes on to observe that "publishers know it’s the pop-culture words that the media will write about, under headings like '"W00t," "Sexting" Now Officially Real Words.' And where critics once railed at dictionaries for including popular slang, now they greet it appreciatively." He goes on to remind readers that lexicographers squirm uncomfortably with this idea of "approving" or "admitting" "real words."