Every so often, dictionaries spruce up their database of lexicography in order to get with the times. Dictionary.com is no different, and announced this week the new additions to the website's catalog of words.
This new suite of 313 new words demonstrates, intentionally or not, the way that technology and the digital world are changing our own language. The phrase "digital nomad," for example, which describes someone who works remotely from different corners of the globe, can't exist in a world without laptops.
[...] "Language is, as always, constantly changing, but the sheer range and volume of vocabulary captured in our latest update to Dictionary.com reflects a shared feeling that change today is happening faster and more than ever before," said John Kelly, senior director of editorial at Dictionary.com, in a press release sent to Gizmodo. "Our team of lexicographers is documenting and contextualizing that unstoppable swirl of the English language—not only to help us better understand our changing times, but how the times we live in change, in turn, our language."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 05, @05:36PM (7 children)
We can't go on like this, adding words. We must have balanced dictionary with new words added only if old words are thrown out. There is only so much brain power.
(Score: 2) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Sunday March 05, @06:11PM (4 children)
What's the problem with the dictionary getting longer? Language is a living thing. New words are created every day. Some stick long enough to make it into the dictionary. The ones that fall into disuse can stay, what's the harm? If someone reads an old text and looks them up, they're still here. It makes the language richer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 05, @06:17PM
It's our heritage.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Sunday March 05, @07:41PM (1 child)
Maybe the English language is like C++ or Perl 6? It will go on getting more and more complicated forever until it fragments into local dialects that only certain people speak.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Monday March 06, @02:45AM
[eyes divergent internet communities]
Too late!!
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Sunday March 05, @09:11PM
Poe's law strikes again, it appears. Yon anonymous foole hast verily tricked thee.
The word "astronaut" was coined by Neil R. Jones, a New York Unemployment insurance claims investigator who wrote science fiction on the side, in the January 1930 Air Wonder Stories magazine story The Death's Head Meteor.
When Isaac Asimov coined the word "robotics" he thought it was already a word.
Then there's the stratodoober...
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 4, Funny) by Tork on Sunday March 05, @07:47PM (1 child)
Slashdolt Logic: "25 year old jokes about sharks and lasers are +5, Funny." 💩
(Score: 3, Funny) by inertnet on Monday March 06, @01:08PM
You want them to go straight from 8 to 64-bit?