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Do Words Ever Get Removed from the Dictionary?
The Second Edition of the Oxford English
Dictionary is generally regarded as the single most
comprehensive record of the English language to exist. Included in this
work are many thousands of words considered completely “obsolete” by
lexicographers. You see, in something of a Hotel California of
linguistics, once a word has made it into the OED, it can never leave.
Whether other dictionaries remove words or not varies from dictionary to
dictionary, but major dictionaries who attempt to put out
"complete" editions tend to follow suit in never removing words
once they make it in. However, the much more common concise editions of
all dictionaries do occasionally remove not just obsolete words, but
sometimes quite common ones that simply don't fit and are deemed less
important to include than other words for various reasons.
Before we get to how a word becomes obsolete in the eyes of dictionary
creators, it’s helpful to understand how a word enters the dictionary in
the first place and what it means for a word to be there, with the latter
being something of a common misconception.
While it's very common for people to say something like, "It's not
in the dictionary, so it's not a word", this sentiment is rarely, if
ever, shared by professional word-nerds. One does not have to look
hard to find editors at all of the major dictionaries specifically
denouncing this popular notion. As co-founder of the phenomenal
word reference sight Wordnik and one time chief
editor of American Dictionaries at Oxford University Press,
including editing the second edition of The New Oxford American
Dictionary, Erin McKean, notes,
"All
words (aside from unintentional errors and malapropisms) are words at
their birth. All you have to decide is whether the word in question is
the right one for the job. Dictionaries don’t measure realness; they
serve as rough proxies for the extent of a word’s use."
Or as
noted in the FAQ section of Merriam-Webster's website,
"Most
general English dictionaries are designed to include only those words
that meet certain criteria of usage across wide areas and over extended
periods of time. As a result, they may omit words that are still in the
process of becoming established, those that are too highly specialized,
or those that are so informal that they are rarely documented in professionally
edited writing. The words left out are as real as those that gain entry;
the former simply haven't met the criteria for dictionary entry – at
least not yet (newer ones may ultimately gain admission to the
dictionary's pages if they gain sufficient use)."
Going
further, in a rather enjoyable diatribe on this general tiopic, professor
of linguistics at Stanford, Arnold Zwicky, states,
"We
start with the admonition that people of taste and refinement should not
use X. This is then exaggerated, elevated to the admonition that people,
in general, should not use X; what should govern the behavior of the
"best" of us in certain
circumstances should govern the behavior of all of us, all of the time,
in all contexts, for all purposes.
As if
that weren't enough, it ratchets up, hysterically, one more notch, to the
bald assertion that X simply isn't available for use; it's just not part
of the social repertoire. My dear, it just isn't done.
But if
it truly isn't done, then there's no need for the admonitions.
Don't
tell me there's "no such word". Parade your idiosyncratic
prejudices, if you wish, and if your mind is open enough we might be able
to talk about the bases of your prejudices (and mine). But don't lie to
me about the state of the language."
Backing up this slightly philosophical point of view with real world
usage is a 2011 paper published in Science, "Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized
Books", which analyzes the language used in
5,195,769 books (about 4% of all books ever published). Among other
things, they found that when comparing words used in those books to the
OED and Merriam-Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, even when excluding
proper nouns (which those dictionaries don't include), "a large fraction
of the words in our lexicon (63%) were in this lowest frequency bin. As a
result, we estimated that 52% of the English lexicon – the majority of
the words used in English books – consists of lexical 'dark matter'
undocumented in standard references."
On a similar note, with regards to not just what constitutes a word, but
proper usage, the OED also distances themselves from carrying that
banner, stating quite frankly,
"The
Oxford English Dictionary is not an arbiter of proper usage, despite its
widespread reputation to the contrary. The Dictionary is intended to be
descriptive, not prescriptive. In other words, its content should be
viewed as an objective reflection of English language usage, not a
subjective collection of usage ‘dos’ and ‘don’ts’."
In the
end, language is an ever evolving beast and really any combination of
letters can count as a word if said combination has or is given some
meaning; and grammatical conventions exist to serve language,
not the other way around.
For reference here, the venerable OED *only* contains about 600,000
entries, with most lexicographers estimating there are probably actually
about twice that many words in the English language. There is much
debate on this, however, owing to what actually counts as a distinct
word. For instance, Webster's Third New International Dictionary lists
12 distinct words spelled "post". On top of this, there are
numerous regional slang terms largely unknown by the general speaker of
English that would never be included in most dictionaries. On that note,
Wordnik, which seeks to document every word ever appearing in the English
language, regardless of dialect or how obscure the word is, currently has
almost seven million unique entries!
Alright, so now we've laid to rest the popular notion that dictionaries
are the bastions of what counts as a word or not. If even the OED isn't
including every word, then what is required for a word to make it into
their distinguished record of the English language?
In two words- sustained usage.
Or to quote the OED on their general method:
"The
OED requires several independent examples of the word being used, and
also evidence that the word has been in use for a reasonable amount of
time. The exact time-span and number of examples may vary: for instance,
one word may be included on the evidence of only a few examples, spread
out over a long period of time, while another may gather momentum very
quickly, resulting in a wide range of evidence in a shorter space of
time. We also look for the word to reach a level of general currency
where it is unselfconsciously used with the expectation of being
understood: that is, we look for examples of uses of a word that are not
immediately followed by an explanation of its meaning for the benefit of
the reader. We have a large range of words under constant review, and as
items are assessed for inclusion in the dictionary, words which have not
yet accumulated enough evidence are kept on file, so that we can refer
back to them if further evidence comes to light."
Evidence
of a potential new word’s use is provided mostly by volunteers who pore
over everything from magazines to obscure scientific journals as part of
something dubbed the "Reading Programme", which “recruits
voluntary and paid readers, and these readers provide the OED editors
with quotations which illustrate how words are used.”
These quotations are all meticulously catalogued and if they happen to
contain a new word or “new sense of an existing word" editors aren’t
familiar with it can easily be cross-referenced with other quotations to
see if it needs to be added to the dictionary or perhaps investigated
further.
As it is the mission of the OED to provide “a permanent record of [a
word's] place in the language”, once a word is deemed worthy to be added
to the dictionary, as previously noted, it will never be removed,
regardless of whether or not it later falls out of use.
The reasoning behind this is twofold- first, to ensure the OED remains as
close to a definitive record of the English language as practically
possible; second, to ensure a reader can be reasonably confident that a
large percentage of the time, any word they do not know the definition or
meaning of will be found in the OED. To quote the OED website: “The idea
is that a puzzled reader encountering an unfamiliar word in, say, a 1920s
novel, will be able to find the word in the OED even if it has been
little used for the past fifty years.”
Though admirable, a side-effect of this dedication to broadly documenting
the English language is that editors struggle mightily to keep up with
the rate at which language evolves. For example, the complete Third
Edition of the OED, the hotly anticipated follow-up to the Second
Edition, isn’t set to be completed until around the late 2030s and at
an estimated production cost of around £34 million (about $45 million).
As an idea of how painstakingly slowly this process is, in 2010 the Third
Editionwas estimated to be 28% complete. At the time, around 80
lexicographers, then led by John Simpson, had been working on it for 21
years...
In fact, Simpson ended up retiring in 2013 after 24 years of working on
the OED3, with the chief editor job falling to then 48 year old Michael
Proffitt. Given the estimates for the completion of the Third
Edition, Proffitt will be around 70 years old, and perhaps himself
retired, by the time it's finished.
So yeah, Game of Thrones fans, if you think you Throners
have had it bad waiting for the next book in the series to be finished,
spare a thought for us OEDers.
Now, although it is the policy of the OED to never remove a word from the
dictionary, they do release abridged versions containing what they feel
reflects “the living English language” at the time, or in some editions a
set of words curated to be suitable for a given audience.
Towards this end, the OED, and other dictionaries, regularly remove what
they feel are “obsolete” words from newer editions of abridged versions.
This has historically been done for the sake of cost and size
practicality, though the digital age is rapidly making this less of a
concern.
To illustrate how much of a problem this historically has been, however,
consider the Second Edition of the OED, which consists
of a collection of a whopping 20 volumes and roughly 22,000 pages; that's
a lot of paper, binding, and shipping. The end cost to the consumer for
that complete set is in turn about $1100. (And
it should be noted that, according to Chief Executive of Oxford
University Press, Nigel Portwood, the OED has never made a profit, even
with such prices, not to mention the $295 annual fee if one wants access
to the online digital edition.)
Obviously the market for such a massive physical product is very niche,
and most word-nerds these days who do have a use for the product use the
digital version anyway, including ourselves, as it's a vastly superior
research tool. This is, in part, why the completed much longer Third
Edition will likely never be printed. But concise print
editions are still somewhat commonly used, at least for now, so it makes
sense to trim some of the more extraneous content and release an abridged
version that doesn’t cost as much as a flight to Hawaii or take up an
entire bookshelf.
So how is it decided which words won’t make the cut in these concise
editions? Well this process varies from publisher to publisher, although
the typical method seems to be simply going through the previous edition
with a fine toothed comb to look for words that are no longer terribly
common in a given sphere- hopefully finding more words that are
acceptable to cut than new words that need added, though this seems
rarely to be the case.
For example, Angus Stevenson, the head of dictionary projects at the
Oxford University Press was tasked with cutting 200 words from the 12th
edition of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary to make
way for around 400 newer words in 2011. To accomplish this, he had to
rejigger the font and formatting in the dictionary to avoid having to cut
too many words still in relatively popular use.
Editors at Collins dictionary had to do more or less the same thing when
they excised some 2000 words from their 2008 edition to make way for
newer words more familiar to modern English speakers. The senior editor
of the dictionary, Cormac McKeown, would later explain that to accomplish
this, “We've been fiddling around with the typeface to try to get more
in, but it is at saturation point. There is a trade-off between getting
them in and legibility."
Unfortunately, this inevitably leads to familiar, but somewhat obsolete,
words being removed. For example, in the aforementioned 12th edition of
the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, amongst the
entries culled were the likes of "cassette player"
in favor of things like "mankini" (though "cassette
tape" still remained, contrary to many dozens of news reports we
read to the contrary).
This process can become highly controversial, such as happened in the
case of the Oxford Junior Dictionary, where they decided to
cut out about 50 words connected to nature, like "acorn" and
"buttercup", using the freed up space to add words like
"chatroom" and "blog". As the latter new technologies
have given rise to everyone having a platform for their outrage, naturally, this resulted in a well-published outcry over the
removal of words describing the "outside" world in favor of the
"interior, solitary".
Of course, these words weren't actually being removed from the English
language (nor common usage), merely a Junior Edition of
the dictionary which could only include a minuscule 10,000 or so of the
over 600,000 entries found in the OED. In the end, the editors simply
chose words that best reflect those that kids today most frequently use
or encounter.
So to sum up the question posed at the start of this article, if you’re
referring to complete editions of certain major dictionaries, like the
OED, once a word is added to it, it will never be removed. However, if
you’re referring to the more commonly found various abridged dictionaries
lying around, words are removed whenever the respective editors decide
they are no longer as relevant as other words, even if sometimes those
cut words are still relatively commonly used... Bringing us all back to
the point that if ever someone picks up such a dictionary and tells you
the word you just used "isn't a word because it's not in the
dictionary", you have our permission to slap them upside the head*
with that very tome of knowledge and then politely tell them that's not
how dictionaries or languages work...
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