HIGH DEFINITION
How the slow art of dictionary making is changing pace to keep up with fast talk in the digital age,
Long before Oxford Dictionaries named the tears-of-joy emoji 2015’s “word” of the year, the language grumps were grumbling about the downfall of the written word.
Dictionary.com had recently sanctioned “fleek” and “yaaas” — with three a’s. Merriam-Webster had officially welcomed “wtf” and “nsfw” into its fold. “Bae” and “bezzy,” “YOLO” and “wahh,” “fur baby” and “mkay” — hardly a month goes by without one of the world’s most reputable dictionaries trumpeting some tidbit of Internet slang.
“Don’t get butthurt about our bants!” reads a recent press release from Oxford Dictionaries — the same Oxford Dictionaries that traces its roots back to the parlours of London intellectuals in the 19th century.
Dictionaries have always added new words, of course; if they didn’t, they’d be useless. But skeptical philologists are correct in observing that the pace has grown faster, the incubation times shorter, and the neol- ogisms frequently more “ridic.”
As always, you can blame the Internet.
“The life cycles of words are infinite,” said Katherine Martin, the head of U.S. dictionaries at Oxford University Press. “But the cycle has changed, and it’s now quite quick.”
We’ve long known, of course, that the Internet and the mess of technologies we use to access it shape the way we communicate. Less discussed, but equally important, is how the Internet has changed the institutions documenting, codifying and endorsing the language.
Historically, dictionaries have been written by teams of people called lexicographers, who pore over thousands of pages of printed materials looking for new words (and new uses of old ones). Today, lexicographers still define words, of course; they just have totally different methods for going about it.
Most of the major dictionaries, including Oxford, Merriam-Webster and Dictionary.com, subscribe to data services that bundle news articles, blog posts, forum updates, status messages, site comments and a whole lot of other data streams into a massive dump that sums up how the Internet’s talking.
At Oxford Dictionaries, Martin explains, that back-end technology includes a tool that graphs how many times a new word has been used, and over what period: if it spikes, it’s a meme; if it fizzles, it’s a stunt; if it goes up and stays up, it might just be worth adding to the “definitive record of the English language.”
There are other listening posts, too. At Merriam-Webster, lexicographers keep a close eye on what is trending in user searches.
At Dictionary.com, they scrutinize the searches that turn up a “Did you misspell that?” page. Often, said Jane Solomon, a Dictionary.com lexicographer, those misspellings are actually new words. And because online editions have no space constraints or unwieldy publishing schedules, there’s little cost to adding them.
“Words are simply more discoverable now,” Solomon said. “Words that pop up in small communities, or among friends on forums, are now publicly available to lexicographers.”
The dictionary industry, such as it exists, has not been immune to greater shakeups across the publishing world. Sales of reference books plummeted 37 per cent between 2007 and 2014, the earliest and most dramatic downturn in the non-fic- tion category. Online, even the bestestablished dictionaries have watched upstart Urban Dictionary and behemoth Google claw into their territory.
The vast majority of dictionary users today don’t crack open the latest Merriam-Webster, or even type m-w.com into their address bar, but simply google the meaning of the word they want.
Since August 2013, when Google’s OneBox stopped linking to dictionary sites, the search engine has handily trapped word-searchers within its own, proprietary web. Search “define” plus any English word, and it will produce a definition on top of the results page, without the need to ever actually click.
According to SimilarWeb, a digital insights firm, desktop traffic to the largest online dictionaries has fallen steadily since then. In the past year, Oxford is down 8.5 per cent, Dictionary.com is down 10.2 per cent and Merriam-Webster has a third less traffic now than it had just14 months ago.
While lexicographers at MerriamWebster say they still adhere to oldschool criteria for adding new words — is it used widely? Has it stuck around? Is the usage meaningful? — that standard isn’t interpreted quite so strictly across the board. Now, said Solomon of Dictionary.com, she’s very comfortable adding a word that “turns out to be a viral meme” or Internet joke.
In the coming year, her publication will switch to a monthly word addition schedule — a change that Oxford hopes to make soon, as well. In a future world, Martin suggests, dictionaries could update as frequently as Buzzfeed’s lesser verticals.
“If we have information about words that people are interested in, then we should publish it,” she said.
This is a case that Martin has made before — most recently, over the tears-of-joy emoji, Oxford Dictionaries’ 2015 “word” of the year.
When Martin first heard the pictograph pitched in a meeting of the Word of the Year committee, she had reservations — emoji are demonstrably not words, she felt. Picking it would represent some kind of elemental violation. And yet, as the debate wore on, Martin found herself warming to the pro-emoji case: After all, people are using emoji like words.
“It’s supposed to get people thinking about the fact that language is not set in stone,” she said. “Language is changing all the time.”