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Here's a look at what's been added to the English language in the last ten years or so (writing in early 2008.)

Let it be known upfront that I'm no linguist, just a normal sort of word fan, and that there are many unscientific things about this "study". The exact time frame is fuzzy; call it 1995 to 2005, plus or minus a few years on either end. I've only taken two dictionaries into consideration, and I've only examined words up to eight letters long. Never mind that no one anywhere is vested with the power to decree whether or not something is a "real word", anyhow. Still, a lot of thought by a lot of highly qualified people goes into putting a dictionary together, and I doubt we have any better gauge.

Making this look at new words perhaps even more interesting is that the two dictionaries I examined are at opposite ends of the spectrum from each other. One is the American Heritage Dictionary Fourth Edition (2006), which I take to be on the conservative end of the dictionary spectrum; the other is the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary Fourth Edition (2005), which indiscriminately grabs up any word it can get its hands on for the benefit of point-crazed Scrabble players. If I've exaggerated there, I don't think it's by much. The first edition of the Scrabble Dictionary (1978) pulled every word of eight letters or less from five or more different standard dictionaries, and I'm given to believe they plunder even more sources now. So you might view this as a study of the highly respected American Heritage vs. "everybody else, combined".

For convenience, let:

AmH4 = American Heritage Dictionary Fourth Edition.
OSPD4 = Official Scrabble Players Dictionary Fourth Edition.

Both of these dictionaries had third editions dating from about 1995. That works out neatly, doesn't it - both dictionaries taking ten-year strides in synch with each other, and using the same edition numbers? To be honest, I do not have the American Heritage Third Edition. I make the assumption that any word just now being added to the OSPD4 is very unlikely to have been in the AmH3. I am also pretending all new words in the AmH4 (up to eight letters long) are in the OSPD4. If neither assumption is absolutely correct, it doesn't change the essence of what we have here one bit - a pretty exhaustive look (up to eight letters) at what has been added to American dictionaries in a particular ten-year period.

What made this study possible for me is a web page which lists all the words added to the OSPD4. (Scrabble players know how to generate word lists!) I'll bet you can find it by searching on "PEPINO PERITI PERNIO" (in quotes). The book itself claims that 4000 entries have been added since the 1995 edition. The web page counts up only 3235 new words, and of those, about 175 were "erroneously omitted" from printings of the OSPD4. (A large percentage of the omitted words are registered trademarks. Kind of hard to swallow that all of those words were coincidentally left out of the print version by accident. Do tournament Scrabble players really get to play JELLO and KLEENEX now???)

If you're like me, the first thing you wonder about when you read a claim like "4000 new entries" is, does that mean 4000 new main entries? or does it include all the inflected forms of each new main entry? Rest assured, it means the latter. BRUX, BRUXED, BRUXED, and BRUXING, for example, count as four of the new entries. OAKY, OAKIER, and OAKIEST count as three. APP and APPS count as two.

Thus, we see that the English language has really had far less than 3235 basic, main-entry-type words added to it in the ten-year time frame.

Since these inflected forms are automatic, I don't find them interesting for the sake of this study. The first thing I did with the list of the new OSPD4 words was eliminate all of the standard inflections of new base words. In the examples above, we'd be left with BRUX, OAKY, and APP.

If an old word gained a new meaning as a different part of speech, I generally deleted the various new inflections and just noted the new part of speech for the old word. So, for example, from a Scrabble player's point of view, AMPED and AMPING are new words. But what really happened is that AMP has gained a verb definition, so I replaced the pair with AMP(v).

Likewise with CROOKER and CROOKEST, indicating a new adjective use for CROOK; I replaced the pair with CROOK(adj).

There are instances where a familiar word is seen with an -S, such as ASOCIALS, FERALS, and SMILEYS. This means an old word, often an adjective, has taken on a new noun definition. I indicate this with "(n)" - ASOCIAL(n), FERAL(n), and SMILEY(n).

Given all that, understand that where you do see the suffixes -ED, -ING, -ER (comparative), and -S, it means the inflection itself is newly allowed. So HISSIER means HISSY was already around but the comparative and superlative are now accepted. (I stonewall the superlative.) CANNOLIS means CANNOLI can now take an -S. What about BUCKOS? Surely BUCKO has been around for a long time, so why BUCKOS now? It's just a new pluralization, in addition to the old BUCKOES. Assuming that I didn't goof up - and, no doubt, there are plenty of slips in there - you can figure ALIASING must be something other than a past participle for a new verb usage for ALIAS. Otherwise, I would have shown ALIAS(v). Yes, ALIASING gets its own new noun entry. Likewise with most of the -ED words such as PATINAED and CLOVERED - not a new verb usage for and old noun, but a new adjective meaning covered with whatever stuff.

What about CHEFED? It doesn't seem like we'd need word for "crawling with chefs". If it indicated a new verb usage for CHEF, I would have shown CHEF(v). The solution to the mystery is that it's a new alternate spelling for the old verb CHEFFED.

What about POLYPED? Trick question! Not covered with polyps, but a critter with lots of feetsies!

Given those examples, you should almost always be able to figure out what's going on whenever you see some good, old, familiar word with some good, old, familiar suffix crashing this party of supposedly brand-spanking-new English language words.

Besides deleting inflected forms to distill the list down to its essence, I deleted all the registered trademarks added to the OSPD4. In fact, almost all of these trademarks have an entry in the AmH4, but they are shown as proper nouns and the definitions explicitly say "a trademark". Also among those "erroneously omitted" official Scrabble words are the geological periods. Again, the AmH4 has them all, but still as proper nouns. I've deleted them from the study as well.

I've organized the words into eight(!) categories for each letter of the alphabet. Don't worry - it's not so bad.

The first binary division is between new words which are included in the AmH4 and those which aren't. AmH4 WORDS ARE SHOWN IN ALL CAPITALS. Non-AmH4 words are shown in all lowercase. Notice I can't say, "OSPD4 words are shown in lowercase." All the words listed here are OSPD4 words; the OSPD4 words not included in the AmH4 are shown in lowercase. Better yet, think of them as all the other dictionaries besides the AmH4 since the OSPD pulls its words from all the important dictionaries (and then some?)

The next binary division is between "familiar" and "obscure". Familiar words, whether or not in the AmH4, are boldface. Words which I consider more obscure are not boldfaced. You don't need to be told that this division into familiar and obscure is strictly personal. I don't claim that I could have defined all the "familiar" words in advance. I put words in that category if, after looking them up, I had a feeling of, "Oh yeah, I could have guessed that!" (INCENT means to provide an incentive) or, "Oh, that's neat!" (a PANGRAM is a sentence that uses all the letters of the alphabet.) I included Hispanic words which I felt like I should know, and which I figure many other Americans are already up on. (MASA is a corn dough.) It's the same with a few Middle Eastern words in there; even if I didn't already know them, I figured folks more tuned-in to world news would. (HIJAB is not how a footballer celebrates a touchdown.)

That divides all the new words into four categories. The final binary division is between main-entry-type words from the words which are merely derivative. [ I put the derivative words in brackets. ] In my view, they're no big deal - nothing really new. This is where you'll see most of the newly allowed inflections of old, familiar words, including -S (plural), -ER (comparative), -ER (one that does), -EE (victim of the do-ER), -Y (adjective), -ISH (adjective), -ABLE (adjective), -LY (adverb), and noun-ED (adjective). It's where I put RE-, UN-, and PRE- words. It's where I put alternate spellings, whether of an old word (QABALA for KABBALAH), or for one of the new words (BURKA for BURQA). The brackets are where you'll find old words which have put on the mantle of a different part of speech, such as AMP(v) and GLITZ(v). All of that is pretty far removed from the issue of "What's new in our language?", as far as I'm concerned. At best, it's pretty darn unexciting. But you may look them over if you want.

Summary of layout:

At this point, you could count up the number of new main-entry-type words if you were so inclined. That would be everything not in the brackets. Even so, many of these new words are really just new compound words formed from a familiar pair that's gotten so worn in it's lost its space or hyphen (DAYCARE, JETLAG, PUTDOWN, etc.) Perhaps I should have put these inside the brackets, too. When you think about it, even our new computer and modern technology words are nothing more than familiar words informally clipped at the front, back, or middle (BLOG, EMAIL, WEBCAM, TELNET, etc.) A word that looks completely unrelated to familiar English words is probably a direct import from another language (ECHT, DISEUR, INTIFADA). In fact, you have to look pretty hard to find a really brandnew, totally-out-of-the-blue, original English word. I just spent a few minutes scanning the "familiars" to find an example to put here, and the best I could do was DUH. Pretty pathetic, huh? Ok, I just noticed STENT. That's been around for about 50 years but I guess is only making the grade now because it had been considered medical jargon? Two words, DUH and STENT . . . e pluribus (4000) duum! (oof)

I do have a single, favorite new word out of the batch: RETRONYM - "a word or phrase created because an existing term that was once used alone needs to be distinguished from a term referring to a new development, as analog watch in contrast to digital watch." This touches my life in that the classical guitar has been a hobby of mine for decades, and the "classical" always sort of bugged me. It had been the guitar for a few hundred years, and then the steel-strings and the electrics came along and ruined it. One that's always tickled my funny bone is grass. It was just plain grass for about a billion years, and then AstroTurf came along, whereupon various sporting contests started taking place on real grass, hee hee. So neat that they came up with a word, and such a nice one, for this wacky phenomenon!

And now, ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, for the first time on any stage, anywhere (except maybe the 1991 Random House Webster's), let me introduce to you . . .

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Helpful keywords not in the main text: recent additions to the english language; this page is real interesting.

And if you liked this one, please visit my page of Scrabble II for word lovers!