Sunday, April 5, 2009

5 words that should be in the OED


Happification
Rejoicifying
Disrespectation
Swankified
Dictionarised.

Thanks, C! :)

How do new words come about in the Oxford English Dictionary, the self-exulted "definitive record of the English language"?

All of Oxford's English dictionaries aim to include primarily those words that have genuinely entered the English language. The use of a newly invented word by a single person is not sufficient to merit a dictionary entry (unless the person happens to be, for example, William Shakespeare or Jane Austen).

...There is nothing to stop you using an invented word - so long as you don't mind the fact that it will not be understood and will have to be explained every time. If it genuinely fills a gap in the language, then it may well catch on among a significant section of the population. It will then have become part of the language, and if it is used in print (or can be traced, for example, in scripts or transcripts of broadcasts), it will fall within the sphere of the OED's Reading Programme.

From askoxford.com.

So all I have to do now is become William Shakespeare. Or Jane Austen. Or, if you read the entirety of link above, Rudyard Kipling, Emily and Anne Brontë, J.R.R. Tolkien, or Edward Lear.

Choices, choices.

Posted via email from knowledge project

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