How New Words Actually Get Into the Dictionary
Somewhere right now, a word is auditioning. It started as a joke in a group chat or a term of art on a job site; it spread; strangers began using it without explanation. If it keeps that up for a few years, a lexicographer will quietly add it to a file, and one day it will appear in a dictionary next to words that have lived there for centuries. The process is slower, humbler, and much more evidence-driven than most people imagine — and it starts with a surprise: nobody votes words in.
Dictionaries describe; they don’t legislate
The most common misconception about dictionaries is that they are gatekeepers — an academy that certifies words as legal. English has no such academy (French and Spanish do; it hasn’t helped). Modern dictionaries are descriptive: they record the language people demonstrably use, in the senses they use it. As Merriam-Webster’s own explainer puts it, a word gets in when it has sufficient widespread, sustained, and meaningful use. The dictionary is a mirror, not a bouncer — a point of view with a long history of its own, traced well in the Wikipedia overview of lexicography.
The evidence file: citations and corpora
For most of dictionary history, the raw material was the citation: a dated, sourced snippet of a word in the wild, clipped from newspapers and novels onto index cards. Merriam-Webster’s citation files hold millions of them. Today the cards have become corpora — searchable databases of billions of words of real text — and a lexicographer can watch a candidate word’s frequency curve the way an analyst watches a stock. What they look for hasn’t changed: range (used in many kinds of writing, not one subculture), endurance (years, not a viral month), and independence (used without quotation marks or explanation — the moment a word stops being introduced is the moment it has arrived).
A word is real when strangers use it without explaining it. The dictionary entry is just the paperwork.
How long does it take?
Longer than the internet thinks. Even in the fast lane, most words wait years between first appearance and first entry. The OED’s quarterly updates routinely add words whose earliest citations are decades old — the file simply took that long to fill. Some words sprint: pandemic vocabulary went from coinage to entry in months because the use-everywhere-by-everyone test was passed almost instantly. Others crawl for a generation in slang dictionaries before graduating. Speed isn’t the point; the curve is.
The waiting room
Between the wild and the dictionary sits an official limbo. Merriam-Webster runs a public “Words We’re Watching” file — candidates with promising curves that haven’t yet met the bar — and every major publisher keeps an equivalent list in-house. Watching a word graduate is a small spectator sport: side hustle and doomscrolling both spent years in the waiting room while editors checked that the usage was spreading beyond headlines into ordinary sentences. Plenty of candidates never make it out; the limbo file is full of vogue words from 2011 that died there quietly, which is the system working exactly as designed. Skeptics who worry the dictionary is “too easy” now would find the graveyard of failed candidates reassuring — the bar bends toward evidence, not fashion.
Every word was once the new word
It is easy to feel that today’s additions are dilutions — that rizz profanes a book that once held only proper words. But the pedigreed words got in exactly the same way. Quiz appeared in the 1780s with no respectable ancestry at all — the story that it was invented for a bet is probably folklore, but its actual origin remains a shrug, and the full tale of how “quiz” went from nowhere to everywhere is a perfect specimen of the process. Robot was coined in a 1920 Czech play; television was denounced as a barbarous Greek-Latin hybrid; Shakespeare alone is the first recorded user of hundreds of now-ordinary words. The dictionary has always been a ledger of successful upstarts.
Do words ever get kicked out?
Rarely, and never from the big historical dictionaries. The OED’s policy is famously that no word is ever fully removed — obsolete words are simply labeled obsolete, because the dictionary is a record of the whole language, not just its living part. Smaller desk dictionaries do prune for space: words like snollygoster have been dropped and occasionally readmitted by popular demand. Deletion, when it happens, is an editorial decision about shelf space — not a ruling that a word has stopped being a word. English keeps everything in the attic; you can wander that attic yourself in our dictionary index, where yesterday’s upstarts sit beside genuine antiques.
What this means for word lovers
Two practical lessons. First, “is it a real word?” is usually the wrong question — the better one is “is it the right register for this room?” Ain’t is in every major dictionary; that doesn’t make it right for a cover letter. Second, the lexicon is bigger and stranger than any one dictionary: browse the nouns, the verbs, or any of our word lists and you’ll pass entries no schoolbook ever taught you, every one of them earned the same way — by people using it until it stuck. For a broader tour of how English absorbed all this, Britannica’s history of the language is a fine long read.
Dictionary FAQ
Who decides what goes in the dictionary?
Working lexicographers, on evidence — citation files and corpus data showing widespread, sustained, meaningful use. There is no committee that votes on merit, and no way to lobby a word in.
Can I submit a word to the dictionary?
You can, and publishers do read submissions — but a submission is only a pointer. The word still has to demonstrate years of independent use by people who aren’t you. Coining a word is easy; getting strangers to need it is the hard part.
Are slang words real words?
Completely. Slang is register, not legitimacy — a word can be real and informal at the same time, which is exactly how dictionaries label it.