Prizes and Pitfalls of Computerized Searching for New Words for Dictionaries

PRIZES AND PITFALLS OF COMPUTERIZED SEARCHING FOR NEW WORDS FOR DICTIONARIES David K. Barnhart Picture Sir James Murray seated in his editorial office pondering the worthiness for entry of the word appendicitis. This should present no problem for him. For, with hindsight, we can see its obvious importance; after all, it is commonplace today even in school dictionaries. In the last five years of The New York Times and the last thirty months of Time, seventy articles have at least one mention of appendicitis. Surely Sir James would enter it. However, Sir James was not entirely his own man. Only eight years before the Vice Chancellor of Oxford University had sent Sir James a set of "suggestions" to help the editor of the dictionary. These suggestions offered the observation that slang and technical words might be included only if they were used in literature. Sir James foresaw the basic problem: language is unpredictable. Beyond the fact of life obvious to us that language will change with or without our approval, there is no way to foretell what inventions or fads will impose upon us the urge to invent new words. Murray's quandary started because he had the suggestion that appendicitis was a "crack-jaw medical word." To cure his case of appendicitis he consulted the Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford University. Appendicitis was consigned to oblivion. A scant eleven years later Edward VIFs coronation was delayed: he had appendicitis. The word was on everyone's tongue. Had Sir James had a crystal ball, he would surely have included appendicitis in the OED. He might have been unable to resist the urge to include aeroplane, DDT, penicillin, or such words from the 1980s as AIDS, break dancing, computerist, digital disc, exit poll, free-base, gridlock, the hots, ice dancing, jellies (the shoes), kneebreaker, laser disk, megatrend, neoliberal, option mortgage, prenatal brain shunt, quality circle, rockvideo, skunkworks, telemarketing, unbanning, videodisk, worksite, Yuppie, and Z particle. There is no telling what will happen. Dictionary editors must guess what will be important, what new 253 254Computerized Searching for New Words expressions will stick in the language. "The creative act that doesn't respond to some kind of social need isn't going to get picked up," according to Victor Golla, Professor of Sociology at Georgetown University. There are several problems in measuring the growth of the English language. One is the sheer magnitude of the written word, not to mention the billions of words that are spoken each day. To grasp the notion of how great the task might be, Clarence Barnhart took all the magazines at hand for May 1979 and searched them for words and meanings not covered in The World Book Dictionary—about 250,000 entries. He found 1,000 items in need of updating or inclusion. One might justifiably guess that there is a quantity of new words or meanings somewhat in excess of 12,000 each year. Perhaps that figure is too small; more sampling is bound to reveal new items. To undertake the search for new words always brings up the fear that in this fishing expedition the good ones are somehow getting away. This editor gave each of six researchers identical copies of Time for one week. They searched independently for neologisms. The grand total was over 300; no individual found even half that number. In searching in a computer data base for skybox, a term I confidently felt was brand new, I discovered that it had been eluding my attention for ten years. Basic research for evidence to substantiate judgments found in a dictionary based upon original research has traditionally been accumulated on a search-and-find basis. Each example of an item must be found, marked, typed or photocopied, classified, and filed. This meticulous process when intensively practiced by a small staff can yield about 30-50,000 citations per year with a modest budget of about $40,000. In a paper given just a few years ago I outlined the magnitude of the job of sampling changing English usage on a search-and-find basis ("Citations for the Makers and Users of Dictionaries," 1978). In that paper I reported that Publishers Weekly...