There’s no time to ‘chillax’ at the offices of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED for short). Over 170 years after the massive English dictionary project began, entries are constantly being revised and new words added, like, for example, ‘chillax’. This slang word, which means “to calm down and relax; to take it easy, to chill,” was one of around three thousand additions made to the OED in 2019. As the English language keeps on growing, so does the dictionary. How does the OED’s team of seventy lexicographers, researchers and etymologists keep up to date with such a quickly evolving, global language as English?
Adding new words
Analysing social media has been a particularly useful approach for editors, but they don’t automatically include a new word just because they see that people have started using it. Once a word enters the OED it’s never taken out, so the editors have to be sure a word really has become established in the language before they add it. They look for written evidence — books, newspapers, and online communications — showing that the word has been used for some years, usually at least ten, before it gets a place in the dictionary.
Recent updates
Every three months, the editors publish a list of the updates they’ve made to the dictionary. Some of these updates are revisions or additions to existing entries. For example, the first recorded use of the brand name Marmite, referring to the dark, salty paste that some people like to spread on their toast, goes way back to 1902. But 2019 saw the addition of ‘marmite’ as an adjective. Because people tend to either love or hate the taste of Marmite, a ‘marmite’ issue or person is one that divides opinion into two extremes.
The word ‘whatevs’, which is popular with teenagers, also won a place in 2019. This slang form of the word ‘whatever’ is a disrespectful way to demonstrate that you have no interest in what has just been said to you. For example, Parent: “Have you got any homework?” Teenager: “Yeah. Whatevs.”
Controversy
One particularly marmite issue in 2019 was the inclusion of ‘sumthin’, ‘sumptin’, ‘sumfin’, and ‘summink’ as regional variants of the existing entry ‘something’. It’s true that these four pronunciations are widely used in speech but should they really be included in written form in the dictionary? Comments on social media were polarised. The editors argued that including these variants helped to record the English language as it’s actually used, something — or even sumthin — that has always been the guiding principle of the OED.