Scouring the Web to Make New Words ‘Lookupable’

A couple of weeks ago, two of my New York Times colleagues chronicled digital culture trends that are so newish and niche-y that conventional English dictionaries don’t yet include words for either of them.

In an article on Sept. 20, Stephanie Rosenbloom, a travel columnist, reviewed flight apps that try to perfect “farecasting” — that is, she explained, the art of “predicting the best date to buy a ticket” to obtain the lowest fares.

That same day Jenna Wortham, a columnist for The Times Magazine, described a phenomenon she called “technomysticism,” in which Internet users embrace medieval beliefs, spells and charms.

These word coinages may be too fresh — and too little used for now — to be of immediate interest to major English dictionaries. But Erin McKean, a lexicographer with an egalitarian approach to language, thinks “madeupical” words such as these deserve to be documented.

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Wordnik is the world’s biggest online English dictionary, by number of words. This page will give you a quick overview of what you can do, learn, and share with Wordnik.
Definitions

Wordnik shows definitions from multiple sources, so you can see as many different takes on a word’s meaning as possible. For more information about the sources of our dictionary definitions, please see the Colophon page.

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> conventional English dictionaries don’t yet include words for either of them.

“Dictionaries” is an interesting topic.
I grew up with the “concise Oxford”, the latest “concise Oxford” has 1728 pages.
About 15 years ago I switched to the online version of the OED, the full Oxford, vital when you want to know on what date any particular word entered the English language and its Foreign Language roots.
On leaving work I lost OED access and switched to “Collins: Advanced Learners” dictionary. Only half the words but the definitions are the world’s best.
For the rest of the words I switched to Google search engine as my dictionary, not many words that Google can’t find.

Soon after that I noticed that the spellchecker on web searches suddenly improved enormously. But the spellchecker on Word remained appalling, I was adding several new words to it every single day, on more than one occasion I considered storming into Microsoft headquarters and insisting that they fix it.

Now, just in the past couple of weeks, something fantastic has happened. Microsoft has finally got it right. I can type words like Coronavirus, Trypanosome, Strelitzia, PMSL, Glossopteris in Microsoft and the spell checker will not only find them but correct the spelling. Microsoft’s dictionary is finally on a par with that of the web search. Well almost, Microsoft dictionary for instance doesn’t have “myna” or “mynah”, but web spell checker does.

mollwollfumble said:

> conventional English dictionaries don’t yet include words for either of them.

“Dictionaries” is an interesting topic.
I grew up with the “concise Oxford”, the latest “concise Oxford” has 1728 pages.

About 15 years ago I switched to the online version of the OED, the full Oxford, vital when you want to know on what date any particular word entered the English language and its Foreign Language roots.

On leaving work I lost OED access and switched to “Collins: Advanced Learners” dictionary. Only half the words but the definitions are the world’s best.

For the rest of the words I switched to Google search engine as my dictionary, not many words that Google can’t find.

Soon after that I noticed that the spellchecker on web suddenly improved enormously. But the spellchecker on Word remained appalling, I was adding several new words to it every single day, on more than one occasion I considered storming into Microsoft headquarters and insisting that they fix it.

Now, just in the past couple of weeks, something fantastic has happened. Microsoft has finally got it right. I can type words like Coronavirus, Trypanosome, Strelitzia, PMSL, Glossopteris in Microsoft and the spell checker will not only find them but correct the spelling. Microsoft’s dictionary is finally on a par with that of the web spellchecker. Well almost, Microsoft dictionary for instance doesn’t have “myna” or “mynah”, but web spell checker does.

Some words to try out. Are these in the dictionaries?

Web spellchecker, Microsoft spellchecker, Wordnik, Google, word
no, yes, yes, yes, “spellchecker”
yes, no, no, yes, “megapode”
no, no, no, no, “mollwollfumble”
yes, no, yes, no, “myna”
yes, no, yes, yes, “mynah”
yes, no, no, yes, “wikipedia”