Being in the dictionary is not a seal of approval
Many of us settle arguments about a word by asking whether it is “in the dictionary”, as if someone had approved it. The big English dictionaries do not work that way.
Merriam-Webster, the American dictionary publisher, says that when it decides whether to add a word there is “no committee, no advocacy, no meetings”. Its editors, like those at the Oxford English Dictionary, are not deciding which words are allowed. They are deciding whether a word has already been used enough to be written down.
Dictionary editors find new words by reading
On most days, Merriam-Webster’s editors spend an hour or two reading a broad mix of books, newspapers, magazines and online publications. Inside the company this is called “reading and marking”. They look for new words, new meanings of old words and new spellings, and they mark each find along with the sentence around it.
Each marked passage becomes a citation, a record with three parts : the word, the sentence it appeared in, and where that sentence was published. The company started collecting citations in the 1880s, and its files now hold about 17 million of them. One of its editors has said they used to read soup can labels and restaurant menus, because that is language the public actually sees.
One sighting is not enough : a word needs years of wide use
A word gets in only when it turns up in a substantial number of citations, from a wide range of publications, over a considerable period of time. Merriam-Webster may reject a word if all its citations come from one source, or only from the specialist press of a single field.
Its editor at large describes the test as long-term use, widespread use and meaningful use : over time, many publications have used the word to mean the same thing. He calls this looking at language “in the rearview mirror”. A word is often old to the specialists who coined it by the time the general public finds it in the dictionary.
There are exceptions. In the 1980s the word AIDS spread so quickly, and was so clearly here to stay, that editors added it without the usual years of evidence. Size matters too. A smaller dictionary has room only for the most common words, so a word needs more evidence to get into one.
Whether the evidence is enough is a judgment. It rests with the editor who writes the definition, and more senior editors review it later. When a whole dictionary is re-edited, the same editors also decide which existing entries can be dropped.
The Oxford English Dictionary keeps a watch list and waits
The Oxford English Dictionary, known as the OED and published by Oxford University Press, works in a similar way at a slower pace. A candidate word first goes onto a “watch list”. Suggestions come from the dictionary’s own reading programmes, from appeals to the public, and more and more from automated scans of huge collections of text.
According to the OED’s own description of its process, a word without enough evidence stays on the watch list and is checked again later. Only a word with “sufficiently sustained and widespread use” goes to an editor, who traces its history through sources such as newspaper archives, online forums, law texts, recipe books and social media. The Chief Editor and Deputy Chief Editor give the final approval, and new entries appear in updates every three months.
The OED takes its time because it is a historical dictionary. It aims to record English from the eleventh century to today, with each entry telling the word’s life story through dated quotations. Some years ago one of its editors told Smithsonian magazine that the OED “traditionally waits for 10 years of evidence” before adding a word, with exceptions such as livermorium, a chemical element that had only existed since 2012. That was one editor’s remark, not a published rule. The OED’s current policy page sets no fixed waiting period, and an Oxford University Press interview notes that some words are clearly established when they are less than ten years old. Each dictionary sets its own threshold.
A dictionary entry says a word is used, not that it is correct
Since an entry is a record of use, finding a word in the dictionary does not mean it is good style or polite. Merriam-Webster says it relies on evidence so that its dictionaries can “speak with authority without being authoritarian”.
Many dictionaries, including the Spanish one described below, mark this difference with labels. A word may be listed and also labelled, for example as informal, offensive or old-fashioned. The entry tells you that people use the word, and the label tells you how it tends to be received.
The “word of the year” that some dictionary publishers announce is a different kind of choice. Merriam-Webster says it picks its word of the year from words people look up in very high numbers on its website, with a sharp rise over the year before. That measures public curiosity, not the years of written use an entry needs.
Spain’s language academy approves words, and says it only records them
Spanish works differently on paper. The Real Academia Española, Spain’s royal language academy, publishes the main Spanish dictionary, and changes to it go through a formal approval. Committees prepare additions, deletions and corrections, and the academy’s lexicography institute gathers the evidence. Anyone can propose a word through an online form, as long as they show evidence that it is used.
Spanish is spoken in many countries, so proposals also go to the other Spanish-language academies, which review them and reply by approving or amending them. The Real Academia Española’s full assembly, or a commission it delegates, then settles the final wording. The association that links these academies has 23 members, but not every one of them has to endorse every change.
Even so, the academy describes its dictionary in much the same way English editors do. Its style guide says the dictionary “does not invent or propose meanings” but only records them, so a meaning appears “because it has been documented in use”. It adds that people often treat its dictionary as the model of a rule-setting dictionary, but every dictionary is largely a description of use. The norm is worked out from that description.
The French Academy’s last dictionary took from 1986 to 2024
France’s Académie française goes further and is far slower. A committee of its members goes through the dictionary text on Thursday mornings, and the full membership works through it in session on Thursday afternoons. The academy says both are guided by “bon usage”, meaning good usage.
Its ninth edition began in 1986, and the last of its four volumes came out in November 2024. The edition before it dates from 1932 to 1935. The ninth edition has about 53,000 words, 21,000 of them new since the eighth.
The Académie is more willing than English dictionaries to say what to avoid. Its dictionary carries more than 300 “normative remarks” that warn readers about faulty constructions. Yet it calls its work “a dictionary of usage”, and it admits specialist terms only once they have passed into everyday language. It even endorsed a simplified spelling of oignon, the French word for onion, then left it out of its own dictionary because the new spelling had not caught on.
So who decides? Editors sign off, but usage is the evidence
Whether the gatekeeper is an editor in Massachusetts, a team in Oxford or academicians in Madrid and Paris, they all start from the same thing : how people actually use the word. Cambridge says the same of its own dictionary, whose editors check how often a word appears and in how many different contexts over time. What differs is who signs off, how much evidence counts as enough, and whether the institution also sets out what it considers correct.
So a word is not in the dictionary because someone liked it. It is there because enough people used it, in enough places, for long enough, and the editors of that dictionary judged the evidence strong enough to write it down.
