How Do Tech Terms Become Legit?
The ephemeral nature of high-tech terminology poses a challenge to dictionary editors, who tend to adopt new words over a period of years — or decades. If technology moves quickly, the adoption of high-tech terminology into popular mainstream dictionaries — those most commonly used by the general public and scholars — moves so slowly that one might think the editors are out of step. Not so, says Peter Sokolowski, editor at large at Merriam-Webster Inc., which offers both a print edition of its dictionary as well as free access to its contents at merriam-webster.com. Editors track new words from the point of first citation. Most simply don’t make the cut. “We don’t want to have words that come and go,” he says. The fastest word ever adopted by Merriam-Webster was Google (verb tense), which entered the dictionary in 2006, five years after the first citation was noted. “In lexicographical terms that’s light speed,” Sokolowski says. In contrast, the editors had been monitoring malware s
