How Do Words Get into the Dictionary?

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Lexicon Valley Introduction

0:30From Booksmart Studios, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language. Mike Volo is out this week, where I'm not sure, Vegas maybe? Maximum Security Salvadoran Prison? It might just be a spa day. So I'll resume with the second installment of my conversation with Stephan Fatsis, author of Unabridged, The Thrill of and Threat to Modern Dictionaries.

1:03As mentioned in part one, Unabridged is really six books in one, one of which is a quixotic adventure. The author, who once spent a summer trying to be a place kicker in an NFL training camp, this time aspires to professional lexicography, which is where we pick up the conversation as Stephan walks into Merriam-Webster to commence his new position as a definer. It was way more difficult than I imagined, right?

1:35We're journalists, right, Bob? We write all the time. We're smart. We can do this. I was so humbled by the quality and the depth of thought and the intellectual rigor with which definers at Merriam-Webster and elsewhere perform their jobs. And I felt really more imposter syndrome doing this than I did, and I'm not kidding, walking into an NFL locker room and pretending to be a place kicker. I felt way more out of my league.

2:06Like those dudes, I could get to know. I knew I could turn them around, get them to trust me. Yeah, they would make fun of me because I was like a 40-year-old small dude who couldn't kick a ball more than 35 or 40 yards, which is still pretty good, 40 yards. Yeah, it's not bad. Not too shabby. But this felt much more intimidating intellectually, and I felt like I wasn't very good at it. I mean, so many drafts, so many days and weeks, pouring through databases, trying to find the right example sentences, trying to parse meaning.

2:38It was really, really challenging, which makes me pretty proud of the fact that I was able to define as many words as I did and get a few of them into the dictionary. Your pet words are mainly drawn from contemporary culture, particularly slang and sports. Give me some examples. My favorite word was one that I sort of tried to champion as a journalist, which was sportocrat, meaning a sort of executive who works for the International Olympic Committee

3:09or FIFA, the soccer governing body, these aristocratic snobs who run world sports. I made my case to Steve Perot, did a lot of research, wrote a great definition. Alas, it was not accepted and is not in Merriam-Webster. I really tried to find a balance, Bob, between words that were kind of important socially, culturally, politically, and words that were a little bit more fun because I knew that I wasn't just defining words because they needed to be defined to put in the dictionary, but

3:41because I wanted to write the sort of biographies of these words. I wanted good material for the book. So on the political front, I defined microaggression and safe space and alt-right, which were important, I think still are. But really zeitgeist language when you were in the mound. Really zeitgeisty in the late 2010s when I was doing this. And then on the other hand, I defined headbutt, which wasn't in the dictionary much to my surprise, and dogpile to celebrate a World Series victory on the mound, jumping on all of your teammates,

4:15and sheeple, which had this fascinating historical story that needed to be told.

Sheeple Definition

4:23I actually want to dig in a bit to sheeple because that created a kind of a tempest in a teapot. I'm kind of proud of it, right? I made a word go viral. And the backstory is that I did this wonderful deep dive into the history, found the earliest citations in the 1940s, traced how sheeple went from a word that had political overtones originally to one that kind of disappeared from usage for a couple of decades, and then

4:54was revived in the 1980s with the sort of far-right, anti-government, wacko groups who used it to describe people who still subscribe to the notion of a civil society, and then was sort of more adopted into the mainstream. Just became a word that people understood, but it wasn't in the dictionary, so I defined it. I did all this work. I wrote the definition. Definition was accepted. Turned in a few example sentences that the editor could, my editor, Steve Burrow, could choose a couple of to include in the entry on merriamwebsters.com.

5:29He chose two of the four I submitted, goes up online. Within like two days, I start getting emails. Do you know what's happening to sheeple? It was from somebody that knew that I had defined the word. And I was like, oh shit, what? I Google, and like sheeple is blowing up online. Because one of the example sentences I used was from a review on CNN about an Apple iPhone case. And the sentence kind of made fun of Apple users.

6:02It was something along the lines of, even though this iPhone case sucks, the Apple sheeple will still flock to buy it. This, Bob, created a total shitstorm. Newspapers, websites, NPR, all did little pieces about how Merriam-Webster calls Apple users sheeple. Had you only called them shappel, this all could have been avoided. Exactly. So on the one hand, yay for me for bringing attention to the dictionary and its ability to

6:36captivate popular culture online, but also my definition, the humble definition, definitions which are supposed to be hidden, supposed to be anonymous. They're supposed to be just sitting there, like waiting for someone to read and say, oh yeah, of course that's what that means. I drew attention to the definition, which you're not supposed to do in lexicography. So my editor, after a few days, like about a week of this virality, pulled the Apple quote

7:07down. Merriam didn't say anything about removing it. But on the one hand, yeah, okay, wrong thing for a dictionary to want negative attention. On the other hand, lots and lots of people probably went to Merriam's website and looked up the definition of sheeple, which means more clicks for Merriam, which keeps those numbers up. Blowing ad budget on metrics that look great, till the CFO sees them, that's bull spend. And marketers are calling it out in Dashboard Confessions.

7:38I remember telling my boss, it'll be good for the brand, when leads were slow. Yeah, it wasn't. Cut the bull spend. LinkedIn lets you target by company, job title, and more. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit. Go to linkedin.com slash campaign. Terms and conditions apply. You know, at the risk of having two Herman Melville references in the same conversation, which has never happened to me before, I wonder what word was your personal Moby Dick?

8:12What were you monomaniacal about? And did you harpoon the sucker? It was probably sport of crap because I had used it way back in the 1990s in articles I had written when I was a reporter at the Wall Street Journal and later in other places. And I had sort of personally seen it take off and get picked up by other sports writers and other publications. I didn't make it up. The first reference that I originally found was in a Wall Street Journal story by a colleague of mine who was quoting Phil Knight, the chairman of Nike, saying that he didn't want Nike to ever become like the sportocrats that run the IOC.

8:49But then I later, through database diving, found earlier examples. I just think this is such a rich word. And it so beautifully captures the arrogance and the entitlement of the people that run international sports that it should be used even more. And also, you know, in the zeitgeist, and to further defend you, you know, a perfectly legitimate portmanteau. Absolutely. Kind of a lovely portmanteau, right? Like a one that we need. It actually serves the purpose of describing something that exists very, very well.

9:24The problem is that not enough writers, speakers, users have agreed with us, Bob. So it sort of still sits there in this linguistic netherworld where it's just not getting the traction it needs to be justified. But someday I hope it will. And it'll be sitting in Merriam's files waiting for an editor to say, oh, yeah, that's this guy, sportocrat. Sportocrat, it's time to put that into the dictionary. Do you not harbor, you know, at least a small impulse to retreat to a cabin in the middle of, I don't know, Montana, and send explosive letters to the people ultimately responsible?

10:04I think that would be a fruitless task. The editors at Merriam are nothing if not objective stewards of the language. They will then go to newspapers.com and to Nexus and to Google and see how much usage there is of that or any word. The integrity, and I think that's a real word to use here, the integrity of the people that oversee the construction of the dictionary is enormous.

10:36They don't just stick stuff in because, eh, maybe some kids will look it up and we really should get 6, 7 into the main dictionary and keep it there forever. You know, Merriam and dictionary.com, its only competitor left in North America, in the United States, have done a smart thing, which is add a slang portal to their websites so that they can put trendy language in without giving certain words the imprimatur of permanence, of being in the official dictionary.

11:07And you might say this is kind of stupid in the age of Google and AI, but I admire the desire to sort of maintain those standards. Well, I'm glad you brought up 6, 7, because slang by its nature is kind of transitory, ephemeral. And, you know, my best guess is that in a few years, 6, 7 will not only be no longer in wide use, but more or less forgotten. Is there a process for removing words from the dictionary that are no longer relevant?

11:39You know, you were absorbed in adding. What about subtraction? Not anymore, because of the internet. In the era of print dictionaries, you know, Merriam-Webster, as an example, would publish the unabridged dictionary, massive, 2,000 to 3,000 pages, almost half a million words in 1961, the last time the unabridged was printed. As a new edition, once a generation. So there have been eight unabridged dictionaries published by Merriam going back to Noah Webster in 1828.

12:14The company would then revise the collegiate dictionary, the abridged 100,000-word book that sits on your desk and you gave to your kid when they graduated from high school, every decade. As a marketing proposition, publishing a new dictionary meant telling the public, we've got new words. Look, the cover would say 5,000 new entries or 10,000 new words. New and improved, now with 6, 7.

12:45Exactly. But the pages of the dictionary could only grow so much. You didn't want to publish a big, fat book that was too fat. So when you added 10,000 words to the collegiate dictionary, you took out X,000 words to ensure that it was still a reasonable size that wouldn't overwhelm a buyer. You know, Merriam went through, historically, these periods of cramming more and more and more into the print book.

13:16So the unabridged dictionary that preceded the 1961 was published in 1934. And that book was more like an encyclopedia. It was as big, literally, as a bookbinder could handle. Lists and charts and whatnot. And Philip Gove, who edited the 1961 book, said, we're a dictionary. Let's get that stuff out of there. Let's make this thing much more focused on what we are, words. And that allowed him to remove a lot of archaic language, obsolete words, and then add thousands and thousands of new words for the 1961 book.

13:53So that was a way around the paper problem, which was making a slightly smaller book that was more manageable. In the internet age, there's no imperative to take words out. The one thing that Merriam doesn't do, that Oxford, the OED, does better, I think, is indicate when a word was added to the dictionary. The OED is a historical dictionary. So entries will start with the very first reference you can find and then proceed forward in time to give a reader a sense of how a word has evolved and whether it's still in use.

14:27Merriam doesn't append a date of entry for a word. So you're kind of left hanging as to when this word became popular enough to merit enshrinement in the dictionary. You'll have a first date of usage in the entry, so you can see when a word was first created or we think it was first used. But we don't have a sense of when it sort of hit that tipping point to get into the dictionary. And I think that's more important than ever now because this stuff isn't going to come out of the dictionary because there's no reason to take it out.

Technology Impact

15:02So here, as previously threatened, we have at last arrived on this issue of technology. I mean, quaint throwbacking is all well and good, but the technology, the internet and the digital technology long eschewed by dictionary publishers has barged in in the last 15, 20 years to turn their operations and their business models and their future upside down.

15:33Can you describe in what ways the industry was buffeted by what I call the media chaos scenario? Dictionaries actually were pretty forward thinking in terms of technology in the 1960s and 1970s and 1980s. Merriam dumped the collegiate dictionary online at the first possible moment in the mid-1990s. And the business question was, are people going to use this? We're going to give it away for free.

16:04The only way we can do that is if there are users and therefore we can charge advertisers enough to make this an ongoing business. That was a pretty prescient moment. That was John Morris, the publisher who made that decision to not simply license Merriam Webster's dictionaries to other sites, but rather to create a online business of its own. The dictionary as a destination. What's changed in the last 15 years is that with the death of print or the near death of print, Merriam does still sell books and actually did publish a new edition of the collegiate dictionary last November.

16:46But I think mostly as a nostalgia item, as a way to set itself apart from artificial intelligence. That was their tagline. There's artificial intelligence and there's actual intelligence. But for all real business purposes, this is an internet company. But what changed in the last 15 years, Bob? One, Google. Two, AI. Well, it's scary. I mean, even before the AI insurgency, search engines were beginning to jump the line online in any given definition query by placing not the list of search results triggered by the query,

17:25but the definition itself at the top of the results page, essentially poaching clicks from the dictionary publisher's sites and costing them money, a practice that shares a business model, in my view, with cattle rustling. And now comes AI rapidly expanding. I mean, it's astonishing the speed at which it has intruded itself into all things digital, threatening to overtake everything.

17:57The future for dictionary publishers, all publishers, but certainly dictionary publishers among them, seems to be bleaker with every passing hour. What's going to happen? I wish I knew, and I think the remaining dictionary companies in the United States, it's Merriam-Webster and Dictionary.com. That's about it. They are struggling to try to come up with new models and new sources of revenue to stanch the threat from AI, especially.

18:29The AI overview at the top of any search, almost, for a word, just type a word into the search bar, is going to yield an overview that is plenty for most people, right? Why do I need to spend the one second to scroll farther down the page to find Merriam-Webster or Dictionary.com or Cambridge or Oxford or Collins or any other dictionary publisher? They say the best place to hide a dead body is on the second page of Google results.

19:01Yeah. And this is something that the remaining dictionary publishers are going to have to find an answer to. And that answer may be throwing up their hands and recognizing that the primary source of revenue for us will no longer be people looking up words. It's going to be like the New York Times, people coming to our website to play games. Merriam's got like a dozen games on its website, some of which do really well.

19:33Or it's going to be ancillary businesses. It's going to be apps. It's going to be AI products. They have to diversify their revenue base so that they can continue doing this, what I think is critical work of defining words. If the capitalist model doesn't survive, Bob, I don't know. I mean, is it going to be like journalism where nonprofits step in and create a model that makes dictionary making sustainable?

20:05The OED itself is not a money-making business, but it never has been because it's so vast and has consumed so many years and has so many employees. The money at Oxford comes from the university, but also Oxford's got a big publishing business and lots of tentacle businesses, right? They are all over the world in terms of language products and language solutions. So I don't think it's going to be like a benevolent billionaire stepping in. And that didn't work at dictionary.com, which in 2018 was acquired by the guy that owns the Cleveland Cavaliers, the mortgage king, Dan Gilbert.

20:45He sold it to a language software company in 2024. It's not going to be government. That's pretty clear in the United States. Could it be a university? Could it be some sort of public-private partnership? The jury's out, but at some point it's going to be dire because AI can build its own damn dictionary if you wanted it to. AI is not bad at writing definitions, and it's only going to get better.

21:15Yeah, Psy. Yeah. If you had to coin a word for these circumstances, what do you think that might be? Hmm, lexicodepression, lexic. Come on, we can do better than that. Oh, and shitification has already been taken. Thank you, Corey Doctora. Yeah, nice work, Corey. That is simply beautiful. Something lex-based? Tip of the hat to the show. Here's one for you. Okay. We've used it for other purposes in the past, but I think it might fit.

21:49Ready? Yeah. Lexiconundrum. Ooh, it is a lexiconundrum. I hope we have a lexico-happy ending to the future of the dictionary. From your lips to God's ear. Stephan, thank you so much. I truly loved this book, all six of it. Thank you, Bob. It is always wonderful to talk to you. Journalist Stephan Fatsis is author of Unabridged, The Thrill of and Threat to, The Modern Dictionary. Lexicon Valley is produced by Livia Bloom Ingram, who is a force of nature defined as, quote,

22:26a person whose energy and determination make them hard to oppose, end quote. Our editor and executive producer is Mike Volo. Me, I'm stuck writing words down and saying some of them out loud. Get in touch with us at booksmartstudios at gmail.com, subscribe for free at booksmartstudios.com, or, better yet, become a paid subscriber, which gets you all kinds of bonus content and provides us literally hundreds of dollars a year.

23:00Please also leave your comments on Instagram, X, Blue Sky, Facebook, Threads. We are everywhere at Lexicon Valley. And a review on Apple Podcasts is priceless. I'm Bob Garfield. Later, skaters. Wireless can feel like a world of traps, but not with Visible.

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