Tracking word trends 

Dr Laila Abdel Aal Alghalban 

‘Yolo’, ‘adorkable’, ‘selfie’, ‘NBD’, ‘awesomesauce’, ‘Bruh’, Hangry’, ‘vuvuzela’and ‘staycation’ as well as dozens of new words or existing ones acquiring new meaning have found their way to the dictionary. Does this matter? Do dictionaries contain all the words? How do words find their way to dictionaries? And how do dictionary definitions of words resonate with social changes?

As early as writing

First of all, dictionaries, as reference forms, have a long history, dating back to many centuries BC. The first dictionary compilers are the Sumerians, the Egyptians, the Chinese, the Indians, the Greeks and the Romans. Eventually, dictionaries are compiled everywhere else in numerous types: general dictionaries, specialised dictionaries, monolingual dictionaries, bilingual dictionaries, etymological dictionaries, rhyming dictionaries, reverse dictionaries, visual dictionaries, thesauri, glossaries, among other forms. Currently, the most popular dictionaries worldwide are Oxford English Dictionary, Chambers, Merriam-Webster and Collins.

‘Print or online dictionaries: 

Which you trust more?’

With the advent of the digital age, dictionary making has moved to the next level, dumping the traditional print dictionaries and giving way to the handy, interactive, free, convenient, multimodal, constantly updated electronic dictionaries to thrive beyond words. I asked my students this question: “Print or online dictionaries: Which you trust more?” As a digital migrant and someone stuck in traditional look-ups, I cannot imagine sitting in my home library without looking at the dictionary shelf. My long-standing faith in their steadiness and durability grants them special halo and authority worthy of trust. I expected that the majority would go for print dictionaries. However, the digital citizens, teens and tweens, understandably opt for electronic versions, with easier and faster look-ups without turning the pages in the print edition.

To cite an example

‘Word of the Year’, ‘Word of the Decade’ and ‘Word of the Century’ are interesting announcements most of us are excited to follow as they register the vogue words and phrases that due to social, political and technological reasons, vibrantly shine and make a rocketing rise in popularity and use. More interestingly, dictionary firms such as Collins Dictionary and Oxford English Dictionary (OED) draw heavily of the audience or dictionary buffs to suggest candidate words for such word selection events; this is commonly called ‘crowdsourcing’. The candidate word can be a brand new (coined) word, an old word that makes an impressive and surprising comeback, a new collocate or word combination, or an existing word acquiring new senses. At the heart of this selection process are lexicographers.

Lexicographers are very hardworking people who must have solid linguistic background, excellent editorial and organisational skills, quite updated IT training, interpersonal skills, among others. Lexicographers add words to dictionaries, bearing in mind the intended readers’ needs and backgrounds along with the appropriate organisation and presentation of the components of the dictionary. The process of writing a given entry involves a number of stages. One is describing the lemma forms or the family of words for each word, which share the same stem and, roughly, the same meaning. The second one is to organise the different definitions or senses of the word. Other work includes specifying the pronunciations, spellings, usages of words as well as social attitudes to them. In bi- and multi-lingual dictionaries, deciding on equivalents is a top mission. 

What’s in a word?

Language shapes our reality and influences the way we see and treat others. In other words, it defines our worldview. Therefore, the definitions of words in dictionaries are very important as they are used by all the people and promoted by educational, cultural and political institutions. By time, those words and expressions become the norm. No wonder, then, campaigns for changing the current definitions of some socially-sensitive terms usually make headlines in many parts in the world. Campaigners lobby dictionary firms to redefine such controversial terms as gender, woman, family, etc. Let me cite some of them:

 “About 100 high-profile figures have signed a letter to the Treccani Italian dictionary calling on it to change its definition of the word “woman”. They ask for removing words such as whore which reinforce “misogynist stereotypes that objectify women and present them as inferior”.

“A similar campaign for removing words such as to “bint” and “bird” as other ways of saying “woman” from Oxford English Dictionary. They say claiming that words like “bitch” or “maid” are synonyms for the word “reinforce negative stereotypes.” 

Mission impossible  

Finally, dictionaries will never contain all the words of a language. It is a mission impossible. Any language is way too rich to be contained in a dictionary. 

By Dr Laila Abdel Aal Alghalban

Professor of linguistics

Faculty of Arts 

Kafr el-sheikh University

Email: [email protected]