The thing about dictionaries in English is this: they’re descriptive, not prescriptive. Words don’t enter English because you find them in the dictionary; it works in exactly the opposite way. Words enter English, then eventually they (probably) show up in a dictionary.
So how, exactly, do words enter English? Social media! The original social medium is language itself, and a word enters English because somebody uses it, their “followers” pick up on it and start using it too. Eventually it shows up in the search engines — “dictionaries.”
The premier dictionary in English — not that it’s any more authoritative than any other dictionary, but it’s got the best articles about word histories and origins — is the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). It’s a great resource for poking around into words that are obscure, out of fashion, and for whatever reason have de-viralized to the extent that hardly anybody knows them. Take “absquatulate”, for example. It’s a perfectly good word. The rules of English are known to have a relatively flexible approach to what makes a good word — another way to say that is that anything can be a perfectly good English word and there aren’t any rules. Absquatulate had plenty of followers a couple of centuries ago. Everybody knew, at that point, that it meant to leave in a hurry, or run away. But now the word is so obscure relatively few people recognize it.
That’s another function of dictionaries in English; they’re audit logs. You can look back in the log and find evidence about what was going on linguistically at some point in the past. They’re not organized chronologically (usually), but you can find similar resources that are.
But if dictionaries have served as the search engines of English for the past centuries, what about now, when we have software we really call search engines? We’ve still got dictionaries, of course, and people are still working hard at maintaining and updating them. But guess what tools they use to do that now? Search engines. And if a new word turns up in a search engine and looks like it’s in general enough usage, into the audit log — that is, the dictionary — it goes. That’s basically how it’s worked the whole time, whether or not Google was available. In 1965 the OED noticed that “biohazard” was being used and added it. Totally analog process (as far as I know). More recently they added “clickjacking,” and Google was undoubtedly involved. The subtext here is that Google itself is useful but there’s nothing innovative about it. It’s just a different way to do the same things everybody’s been doing forever.
And what they’ve been doing has always been about social media followers, whether they’ve been conversational speakers whose scope depended on the volume of their voice, or ink-stained wretches whose scope depended on printing presses and horse-drawn wagons, or computer users whose scope depends on reposting their social media messages. So get busy; we have “absquatulate” to vote up and “de-viralize” to popularize.
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