The Oxford Dictionary of New Words: a Popular Guide to Words in the News
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The Oxford Dictionary of New Words: A popular guide to words in the news PREFACE Preface This is the first dictionary entirely devoted to new words and meanings to have been published by the Oxford University Press. It follows in the tradition of the Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary in attempting to record the history of some recent additions to the language, but, unlike the Supplement, it is necessarily very selective in the words, phrases, and meanings whose stories it sets out to tell and it stands as an independent work, unrelated (except in the resources it draws upon) to the Oxford English Dictionary. The aim of the Oxford Dictionary of New Words is to provide an informative and readable guide to about two thousand high-profile words and phrases which have been in the news during the past decade; rather than simply defining these words (as dictionaries of new words have tended to do in the past), it also explains their derivation and the events which brought them to prominence, illustrated by examples of their use in journalism and fiction. In order to do this, it draws on the published and unpublished resources of the Oxford English Dictionary, the research that is routinely carried out in preparing new entries for that work, and the word-files and databases of the Oxford Dictionary Department. What is a new word? This, of course, is a question which can never be answered satisfactorily, any more than one can answer the question "How long is a piece of string?" It is a commonplace to point out that the language is a constantly changing resource, growing in some areas and shrinking in others from day to day. The best one can hope to do in a book of this kind is to take a snapshot of the words and senses which seem to characterize our age and which a reader in fifty or a hundred years' time might be unable to understand fully (even if these words were entered in standard dictionaries) without a more expansive explanation of their social, political, or cultural context. For the purposes of this dictionary, a new word is any word, phrase, or meaning that came into popular use in English or enjoyed a vogue during the eighties and early nineties. It is a book which therefore necessarily deals with passing fashions: most, although probably not all, of the words and senses defined here will eventually find their way into the complete history of the language provided by the Oxford English Dictionary, but many will not be entered in smaller dictionaries for some time to come, if at all. It tends to be the case that "new" words turn out to be older than people expect them to be. This book is not limited to words and senses which entered the language for the first time during the eighties, nor even the seventies and eighties, because such a policy would mean excluding most of the words which ordinary speakers of English think of as new; instead, the deciding factor has been whether or not the general public was made aware of the word or sense during the eighties and early nineties. A few words included here actually entered the language as technical terms as long ago as the nineteenth century (for example, acid rain was first written about in the 1850s and the greenhouse effect was investigated in the late nineteenth century, although it may not have acquired this name until the 1920s); many computing terms date from the late 1950s or early 1960s in technical usage. It was only (in the first case) the surge of interest in environmental issues and the sudden fashion for "green" concerns and (in the second) the boom in home and personal computing touching the lives of large numbers of people that brought these words into everyday vocabulary during the eighties. There is, of course, a main core of words defined here which did only appear for the first time in the eighties. There are even a few which arose in the nineties, for which there is as yet insufficient evidence to say whether they are likely to survive. Some new-words dictionaries in the past have limited themselves to words and senses which have not yet been entered in general dictionaries. The words treated in the Oxford Dictionary of New Words do not all fall into this category, for the reasons outlined above. Approximately one-quarter of the main headwords here were included in the new words and senses added to the Oxford English Dictionary for its second edition in 1989; a small number of others were entered for the first time in the Concise Oxford Dictionary's eighth edition in 1990. The articles in this book relate to a wide range of different subject fields and spheres of interest, from environmentalism to rock music, politics to youth culture, technology to children's toys. Just as the subject coverage is inclusive, treating weighty and superficial topics as even-handedly as possible, so the coverage of different registers, or levels of use, of the language is intended to give equal weight to the formal, the informal, and examples of slang and colloquialism. This results in a higher proportion of informal and slang usage than would be found in a general dictionary, reflecting amongst other things the way in which awareness of register seems to be disappearing as writers increasingly use slang expressions in print without inverted commas or any other indication of their register. The only registers deliberately excluded are the highly literary or technical in cases where the vocabulary concerned had not gained any real popular exposure. Finally, a deliberate attempt was made to represent English as a world language, with new words and senses from US English accounting for a significant proportion of the entries, along with more occasional contributions from Australia, Canada, and other English-speaking countries. It is hoped that the resulting book will prove entertaining reading for English speakers of all ages and from all countries. PREFACE.1 Acknowledgements I am grateful to John Simpson and Edmund Weiner, Co-Editors of the Oxford English Dictionary, for their help and advice throughout the writing of this book, and in particular for their constructive comments on the first draft of the text; to OED New Words editors Edith Bonner, Peter Gilliver, Danuta Padley, Bernadette Paton, Judith Pearsall, Michael Proffitt, and Anthony Waddell, on whose draft entries for the OED I based much of what I have written here; to Peter Gilliver, Simon Hunt, Veronica Hurst, and Judith Pearsall for help with corrections and additions to the text; to Melinda Babcock, Nancy Balz, Julie Bowdler, George Chowdharay-Best, Melissa Conway, Margaret Davies, Margery Fee, Ken Feinstein, Daphne Gilbert-Carter, Dorothy Hanks, Sally Hinkle, Sarah Hutchinson, Rita Keckeissen, Adriana Orr, and Jeffery Triggs for quotation and library research; and, last but not least, to Trish Stableford for giving up evenings and weekends to do the proofreading. HOWTO How to Use this Dictionary This topic, with some modification, has been reproduced from the printed hard-copy version of this dictionary. Some display devices limit the effects of the highlighting techniques used in this book. You can see what your display device provides by looking at the following examples: This is an example of large bold type This is an example of italic type This is an example of bold type The entries in this dictionary are of two types: full entries and cross-reference entries. HOWTO.1 Full entries Full entries normally contain five sections: 1. Headword section The first paragraph of the entry, or headword section, gives ° the main headword in large bold type Where there are two different headwords which are spelt in the same way, or two distinct new meanings of the same word, these are distinguished by superior numbers after the headword. ° the part of speech, or grammatical category, of the word in italic type In this book, all the names of the parts of speech are written out in full. The ones used in the book are adjective, adverb, interjection, noun, pronoun, and verb There are also entries in this book for the word-forming elements (combining form, prefix, and suffix) and for abbreviations, which have abbreviation in the part-of-speech slot if they are pronounced letter by letter in speech (as is the case, for example, with BSE or PWA), but acronym if they are normally pronounced as words in their own right (Aids, NIMBY, PIN, etc.). When a new word or sense is used in more than one part of speech, the parts of speech are listed in the headword section of the entry and a separate definition section is given for each part of speech. ° other spellings of the headword (if any) follow the part of speech in bold type ° the subject area(s) to which the word relates are shown at the end of the headword section in parentheses (see "Subject Areas" in topic HOWTO.5). The subject areas are only intended to give a general guide to the field of use of a particular word or sense. In addition to the subject area, the defining section of the entry often begins with further explanation of the headword's application. 2. Definition section The definition section explains the meaning of the word and sometimes contains information about its register (the level or type of language in which it is used) or its more specific application in a particular field; it may also include phrases and derived forms of the headword (in bold type) or references to other entries.