Kids honor late dad in pushing made- up word for dictionary

Hilary Krieger was sitting in her parents’ Boston home, when her friend accidentally squirted himself with an orange slice.

“I said, ‘ Oh, the orange just orbisculated,’” she recalls. “And he said, ‘ It did what?’”

The two made a $ 5 bet, and Krieger gleefully grabbed a dictionary. She flipped to the O’s and stared at the spot where “orbisculate” should have been. Aghast, she burst into her dad’s study and told him the shocking news that the word was somehow not there.

“And he looked kind of sheepish, and that’s when I found out that he made up this word when he was in college and had just been using it our whole lives, as if it were a real word,” Krieger says.

He’d always defined it as “when you dig your spoon into a grapefruit and it squirts juice directly into your eye,” she said.

Two decades later, Krieger, now 44, found herself telling that funny story again and again, in some very sad circumstances. Her father, Neil Krieger, died of complications from COVID- 19 last April at age 78.

As time went by, Krieger said, “I began to think ‘ orbisculate’ is such a great word, why isn’t it in the dictionary?’” So, she called her brother Jonathan Krieger, 35, who lives in Boston. Together, they hatched an elaborate plan to get the word recognized officially.

Getting a word into the dictionary isn’t easy, but the Kriegers’ 50- point plan, as described on their website, is spot on, said Merriam- Webster senior editor Emily Brewster. Encouraging people to use “orbisculate” in a wide variety of contexts will leave a compelling trail of evidence for lexicographers to follow.

To that end, the Kriegers have established Orbisculation Nation to enlist help in checking off items on their list for orbisculation domination.

One family friend went rogue and put a homemade orbisculation warning sign on a pile of grapefruit in a grocery store ( Goal No. 14). When the “Because Language” podcast announced online voting to determine their word of the year, the Orbisculation Nation put their favorite word over the top.

It’s such a good word, it might have won even without their online campaign, says podcast host Daniel Midgley.

“Orbisculate felt like a refreshing splash of citrus in an otherwise grim year of words,” Midgley says.

FAMILY PHOTO The Krieger family, here in 1988 at Boston Harbor for a ferry trip, is working to get their dad’s funky word, “orbisculate,” into the dictionary — and can succeed if enough people start using the word.