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Thursday, February 04, 2010
Are new words appearing in the dictionary faster?
Murray Chass, blogger and researcher extraordinaire:
The word is multitasking. It is such a relatively new word that it doesn’t appear in my dictionary, the third edition (1992) of the American Heritage Dictionary. A nice lady at Houghton Mifflin, the publisher, told me multitasking first appeared in the fourth edition published in 2000. She was also kind enough to read the definition: “The concurrent operation by one central processing unit of two or more processes.” In other words, doing more than one thing at a time.
I was in college in the late 1980s as a Comp Sci major, and I remember the use of multi-tasking then, and not as something new or novel. Merriam-Webster has an online dictionary, and they date its usage to 1966.
Main Entry: mul·ti·task·ing
Pronunciation: \-ˌtas-kiŋ\
Function: noun
Usage: often attributive
Date: 1966
So, from the time of its first usage, in 1966, to the time to entered the American Heritage dictionary, in 2000, 34 years had elapsed.
Interesting that truthiness was named Merriam-Webster’s word of the year for 2006, but it actually does not appear in its dictionary.
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So, how long does it take for a word to actually enter the dictionary, after its first documented use? What is the most recently created word that actually is in the latest dictionary? Google (2001), as a verb, is in the dictionary as of the 2006 or 2007 edition. So, something like at least 5 or 6 years to make sure it’s not a fad? And has this step accelerated due to the internet?
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