EL PASO, Texas (KTSM) — The language we use matters today more than ever as we find ourselves in a world where our words matter as much as our actions.
In sociolinguistics, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis says that the structure of a language determines the speaker’s perception and experience, meaning words can shape a person’s whole world.
The Eskimo have many words for “snow” because their language requires it, the same way English speakers use words like “rain,” “sleet,” “snow,” and “hail” to represent different forms of precipitation in the English lexicon.
This week, Dictionary.com added more than 400 words that focus on race identity and the COVID-19 pandemic, which paves the way for people to have conversations that heretofore have been difficult to express in part because the linguistic structure lacked the appropriate words.
“We have added such terms as ‘BIPOC,’ ‘Critical Race Theory‘ and ‘overpolice,’ which have risen to the top of the national discourse on social justice,” said John Kelly, managing editor of Dictionary.com in a statement. “Another significant decision was to remove the noun ‘slave’ when referring to people, instead using the adjective ‘enslaved’ or referring to the institution of slavery. This is part of our ongoing efforts to ensure we represent people on Dictionary.com with due dignity and humanity.”
In addition to new terms and phrases, Dictionary.com made updates to existing words that it says is part of its mission to represent people with dignity and humanity.
For example, an edit was made to capitalize the first letter in Indigenous in reference to the original inhabitants of a region or religion, as well as their descendants.
Cultural terms that reflect the COVID-19 pandemic were also added that include “doomscrolling” and, of course, “Zoom.”
To see how our words (and world) have evolved over the last 12 months, check out a selection of the added and updated terms with their definitions below:
Race and identity terms
AAL – An acronym for African American Language.
Antiracism – A belief that rejects “supremacy of one racial group over another and promotes racial equality in society.”
BIPOC – An acronym for Black, Indigenous and People of Color.
Chile – “A phonetic spelling of child, representing dialectal speech of the Southern United States or African American Vernacular English.”
Critical Race Theory – “A conceptual framework that considers the impact of historical laws and social structures on the present-day perpetuation of racial inequality.”
Finna – “A phonetic spelling representing the African American Vernacular English variant of ‘fixing to,’ a phrase commonly used in Southern U.S. dialects to mark the immediate future while indicating preparation or planning already in progress.”
Reparation – “Monetary or other compensation payable by a country to an individual for a historical wrong.”
Structural racism – Also called institutional racism or systemic racism, this refers to a policy or system of government that is rooted in racism
COVID-19 and culture terms
Doomscrolling – “The practice of obsessively checking online news for updates, especially on social media feeds, with the expectation that the news will be bad.”
Sourdough – “Fermented dough retained from one baking and used as leaven, rather than fresh yeast, to start the next.”
Superspreader – “A person who spreads a contagious disease more easily and widely than the average infected person.”
Telework – “To work at home or from another remote location.”
Unmute – “To turn on (a microphone, a speaker, or audio), especially after it has been temporarily turned off or when muted sound is the default.”
Zoom – “The brand name of a software application and online service that enables voice and video phone calls over the internet.”
In the summer of 1987, movie audiences first met Robocop in the science fiction classic about violence and corrupt corporate power in a future, dystopian Detroit. But the title word is much older than that, going back at least to a 1957 short story by writer Harlan Ellison, in which a tentacled “robocop” pursues a character. The prefix “robo-,” in turn, dates at least to 1945, when Astounding Science Fiction published a story by A.E. van Vogt mentioning “roboplanes” flying through the sky. “Robo-,” of course, comes from “robot,” a word created by Czech author Karel Čapek in his 1920 play R.U.R.: Rossum's Universal Robots, about synthetic humans created to perform drudge work who eventually rebel, destroying humanity.
This is the kind of rabbit hole a reader can go down in the Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction, a resource decades in the making that is now available to the public in an accessible form. Lexicographer Jesse Sheidlower started the project years ago, when he was an editor at the Oxford English Dictionary.
The OED is the best-known historical dictionary in the English-speaking world, and Sheidlower notes that it was also a crowdsourcing project long before the internet made it easy. When it was just starting out in the 19th century, he says, the OED put ads in literary magazines looking for volunteers to hunt around old books in search of particular words and their usage.
“People would mark up books, send in the notes,” he says. “To this day, it’s still how the system works to an extent.”
When the internet did arrive, the dictionary’s editors quickly took advantage. For example, Sheidlower says, at one point they were looking for early uses of the word “mutant” in the sense of a genetically mutated being with unusual characteristics or abilities. The earliest they’d found was from 1954, but they were sure earlier examples must be out there. So a freelance editor posted a query on Usenet newsgroups and quickly received an example of a use of the word from 1938.
Soon, the editors started looking for other online projects.
“This was at a time, around 2000, when there was the internet… and people were online, but it wasn’t universal like it is now,” Sheidlower says. “We wanted to do a project where people devoted to a particular field, fans, could make contributions.”
Not only were science fiction fans particularly likely to be online, but they were a valuable source of material. The world’s most prestigious libraries, where OED researchers did much of their work, generally didn’t carry back issues of pulp magazines of the mid-20th century, such as If or Amazing Stories. But many fans, it turns out had cartons full of them.
The new project, researching the history of key words used in science fiction, was written up on early blogs and sites like slashdot. Over the decade that followed, it attracted hundreds of contributors. In 2007, editor Jeff Prucher published a book based on the work, Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction.
The project might seem to have run its course, but Sheidlower, who managed the project when he was with the OED, thought there was still work to be done on it. When he left the publication in 2013, he didn’t lose track of the project. Eventually, he got permission to revive it as a personal project. He continued to add terms and references, something made easier by two factors. First, over the past year, the forced inactivity during the pandemic gave him time to work. And second, staff and volunteers of the Internet Archive have uploaded more than 1,000 science fiction pulp magazines, making their entire contents accessible and searchable online.
The May 1939 cover of Amazing Stories, one of the earliest magazines exclusively focused on science fiction (Robert Fuqua / Ziff-Davis Publishing via Wikimedia Commons under public domain)
Elizabeth Swanstrom, co-editor of the journal Science Fiction Studies and an English scholar at the University of Utah, says the dictionary is “a fantastic resource” not just for fans but for scholars interested in the history of science and technology.
“It’s not uncommon in science fiction to see ideas that are being explored later being put into actual practice” she says.
In some cases, science fiction authors are also scientists who bring real research developments into their writing. Others alter the culture’s understanding of new technologies even without technical expertise. Swanstrom notes that the author William Gibson created the idea of cyberspace back in 1982 and helped found the cyberpunk genre, despite not knowing a huge amount about how computers work.
“The terminology that came out of that genre really shaped culture, and continues to do so” Swanstrom says.
Isiah Lavender III, a professor of English at the University of Georgia and co-editor of the science fiction journal Extrapolation, says the dictionary could help in the academic analysis of issues like the social and economic issues reflected in authors’ depictions of robots. He notes that Čapek’s original robots were essentially enslaved beings with human-like thoughts and feelings. Isaac Asimov’s Laws of Robotics, introduced in 1941, could be seen as reflecting slave codes or the Jim Crow laws that still constrained many black Americans’ lives at that time.
“Having these origin dates in mind can help a student or scholar build a framework to analyze something like the concept of the racial ‘other’ where robots and androids (as well as aliens) are stand-ins for oppressed peoples,” Lavender says.
Lavender notes that the dictionary quotations, derived largely from mid-20th century pulp magazines, don’t reflect the diversity of the science fiction world. Many current black science fiction writers, such as Nalo Hopkinson and N.K. Jemisin, don’t make an appearance.
“From the little bit that I have explored in the dictionary, it comes across as a tool that supports a monochrome future envisioned by the golden age editors of the SFF magazines,” Lavender says. “So it’s problematic in that way.”
Nalo Hopkinson speaks at the 2017 Hugo Awards, a ceremony honoring science fiction works, at Worldcon 75 in Helsinki, Finland. (Henry Söderlund via Wikimedia Commons under CC BY 4.0)
Sheidlower acknowledges that the dictionary is limited in the authors and terms it references, but he argues that this is a product of its mission: documenting the “core” vocabulary of science fiction that turns up again and again, both in stories and in the real world.
“When writers do more ‘interesting’ things, it becomes harder to include them in what is meant to be a study of the core vocabulary,” he says. “Samuel Delany is quoted a number of times when he's writing about the usual space-travel stuff, but not much when he goes out of that range. There's only one quote from [Delany’s dense, stylistically complex] Dhalgren, for example, but a lot from Babel-17, just as the OED has ten times more quotes from Ulysses than from Finnegans Wake.”
In general, Sheidlower says, to qualify for inclusion in the dictionary, a word must either be adopted widely within science fiction or become part of the broader culture. “Ansible”—a word for a device allowing faster-than-light communication coined by Ursula K. LeGuin—makes the cut because other authors also use it. Jemisin’s “orogenes”—people with the ability to control tectonic energy—do not because it’s a concept unique to her Broken Earth trilogy. Similarly, “Wookiee” is in the dictionary because Chewbacca is a familiar cultural figure, but dozens of other named alien species from the Star Wars universe that you can learn about on Wikipedia (or Wookieepedia) don’t merit entries.
Of course, it’s easy to find deep dives about nearly every science fiction universe on Wikipedia or elsewhere on the internet. Sheidlower says the dictionary’s mission is different.
“A dictionary’s not an encyclopedia,” he says. “There’s a reason for encyclopedias and there’s a reason for dictionaries.”
The dictionary is a streamlined way to see how terms have evolved over time, and read historical quotations that illuminate their meaning. It also links many of its quotations to the Internet Archive, where readers can see their context and even read the entire story.
Sheidlower says the dictionary, which he is continuing to update as a hobby, is still a work in progress. He anticipates expanding into related fields such as gaming, comics and anime. He also hopes to systematically add entries and quotations from books that have appeared in the ten years since the original phase of the project wrapped up. While Sheidlower has been doing most of the recent work himself, he is looking for volunteers to help out with tasks like checking citations, looking for quotations and drafting entries.
“I do hope there will be interest here,” he says. “For now, I’m still doing everything myself but the system does allow for other people doing that work.”
"COVID-19" set the record for word coinage to inclusion in a dictionary in English: thirty-four days. Dictionaries also fast tracked words that were on their way to inclusion - like “super-spreader” and “self-quarantine.” And they updated a handful of definitions as well, including "bubble" and "lockdown." WBUR's Paris Alston asks GBH’s Edgar B. Herwick III to spell it out.
This segment airs on March 12, 2021. Audio will be available after the broadcast.
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Ayyyee oooo, people not from the Magic City take pleasure in making fun of the way Miamians supposably mispronounce words. Pero it's the interlopers who are wrong, bro.
Last night, "supposably" was among 600 words added to Dictionary.com, alongside "finna," another favorite Miami word that's a phonetic spelling of "fixing to," and "BIPOC," the abbreviation for Black, indigenous, and people of color.
In a tweet, Dictionary.com defines "supposably" as an adverb meaning "as may be assumed, imagined, or supposed."
Here's an example of how to use it in a sentence: "Well, I heard Caro's boyfriend supposably went to Komodo last night and was hitting on all the bottle girls."
Of course, grammar nazis on Twitter lost their shit, bro.
A user named It's MISTER Asshole wrote, "So because people are stupid and can't pronounce or spell SUPPOSEDLY correctly we're going to reward them for their continued ignorance?"
Someone else who just goes by Suzi declared, "What kind of lazy crap is that?? We're just going to add mispronunciations??"
Asere, It's MISTER Asshole and Suzi need to take a chill pill. "Supposably" is, like, super freaking real. According to Merriam-Webster, "supposably" means "as may be conceived or imagined" and is the adverb form of supposable, which means "capable of being supposed or conceived."
It has also been used in the English language as far back as the 17th Century, para que lo sepas. Supposedly is usually a substitute for "allegedly," and the two words are often conflated, Merriam-Webster explains.
"Supposably" now joins "irregardless" as words in the Miami lexicon that are yeah, no, for sure accurate.
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Dictionary.com just updated its database with lots of new words, including two from "The Simpsons" and one from "Friends".
According to FoxNews.com, the two words from "The Simpsons" are from an episode in 1996 called "Lisa the Iconoclast". They are "cromulent," which is defined as "acceptable or legitimate" . . . and "embiggen," which is defined as "to make or become bigger."
The word from "Friends" is "supposably," which comes from an episode in 1995 called "The One Where Heckles Dies". The definition is "as may be assumed, imagined, or supposed."
And they aren't the first dictionary to validate these words either. "Embiggen" is already in Webster's . . . and all three are in the Oxford English Dictionary.
Some of the other words Dictionary.com added in this new update include doomscrolling . . . deepfake . . . indoor voice . . . BIPOC . . . superspreader . . . and goldendoodle.
Dictionary.com announced on Thursday that it had updated 7,600 entries in its online database, adding 450 new words along with 94 new definitions of existing words ― many of which were representative of a chaotic 2020 defined by a global pandemic and racial injustice.
John Kelly, Dictionary.com’s managing editor, said in a press release that the coronavirus had transformed the English language and pointed out that one of the new entries was “the name of an application that, for so many of us, became synonymous with life during COVID-19: Zoom.”
Examples of other new terms that gained mainstream usage during the pandemic include “flatten the curve,” “superspreader” and “doomscrolling” ― a common activity for many during lockdown that is formally defined as “the practice of obsessively checking online news for updates, especially on social media feeds, with the expectation that the news will be bad.”
“Our update also reflects how our society is reckoning with racism, including in language,” Kelly added. “We have added such terms as ‘BIPOC,’ ‘Critical Race Theory,’ and ‘overpolice,’ which have risen to the top of the national discourse on social justice.”
Other race-related updates to the site include words such as “racialization” (“an act or instance of viewing and interacting with people from a racist perspective”), as well as several words stemming from African American Vernacular English, such as “finna” (a “variant of ‘fixing to,’ a phrase commonly used in Southern U.S. dialects to mark the immediate future while indicating preparation or planning already in progress”).
Dictionary.com is not the only outlet to track linguistic changes during a tumultuous year. In Germany, a list compiled by the Leibniz Institute for the German Language revealed more than 1,200 words that had been added to the German language during 2020, including “CoronaFußgruß,” which translates to “foot greeting” and refers to the awkward alternative to handshakes that many adopted during the onset of the pandemic.
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Dictionary.com will no longer use the word "slave" as a noun to identify a person. (Photo: Getty Creative)
As part of its ongoing efforts to feature language that is more inclusive and reflective of modern-day society, Dictionary.com will no longer include the word "slave" as a noun identifying a person, instead using the adjective "enslaved" or referencing the institution of slavery. The change is one of 7,600 updates the online resource has announced, which also include the addition of terms relevant to race, social justice and identity, such as "BIPOC" (Black, Indigenous and People of Color) and "Critical Race Theory."
The latest updates — which also include capitalizing "Indigenous" when referring to people, and adding entries for "racialization," "disenfranchisement" and "overpolice" — follow those announced last September. That round of revisions saw the capitalization of the word Black in reference to people, and the addition of terms relevant to mental health (specifically, suicide and addiction) and LGBTQ identity. John Kelly, managing editor of Dictionary.com, tells Yahoo Life that the changes are an important part of respecting the power of language and its ability to offer representation and dignity.
"We have a responsibility as a dictionary," he says. "We know how words are entering the dictionary, how they're defined — especially those words that concern our social identities, our racial identities, other marginalized identities — we know that this has real effects on real people in the real world. The dictionary can feel abstract, but how words, and how people, are reflected in the dictionary does have real effects."
Kelly cites Dictionary.com's entry on Harriet Tubman as a "powerful example of this change."
"Our old, very outdated definition described her as "U.S. abolitionist, escaped slave and leader of the Underground Railroad"... but what is the effect of calling Tubman an escaped slave?" he notes. "It's dehumanizing. It's dehumanizing to her, it's dehumanizing to all of those people who were subjected to chattel slavery, It takes away her agency and does not hold enslavers accountable."
Tubman is now identified as having "escaped slavery," an edit which Kelly calls "subtle" but "profound." He adds that the new policy regarding "slave" has involved revisions to entries such as "mistress," "master," "Juneeteenth," "plantation" and "Black Code," as well as biographical entries.
"With these changes, we're striving to show respect and dignity to people and how they're represented in our dictionary," Kelly says. "And it's a responsibility we take seriously. It's a privilege. We're proud to get to put people first in all their humanity. That's our thinking behind this change."
Kelly acknowledges that, given the uproar over recent actions taking on racism, such as the Dr. Seuss Enterprises decision to cease publishing six of the author's problematic books, Dictionary.com's revisions may get some backlash. It's a chance he's willing to take.
"I know that there has been some chatter in certain media outlets that have criticized or raised their eyebrows at these changes as a way of fanning the flames of culture wars," Kelly says. "We'll take that backlash because we're making the right choice here. We're striving to put people first and to give them the respect and the dignity they deserve. So if people want to criticize it as cancel culture or wokeness or being too progressive, we'll take that heat because we're making a choice to put people first. That's non-negotiable for us as a dictionary."
Not all of the updates are tied to race. The latest round of updates also include a rundown of dog breeds (see: "goldendoodle") and terms relevant to the coronavirus pandemic and lockdown life ("superspreader," "telework" and "flatten the curve").
Related: Dictionary.com adds words on race, gender, mental health in update
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