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This morning I went to the Comcast site to check my e-mail, and right there along with  headlines about the cost of the Michael Jackson memorial and the bottled vs. tap water debate was Webster Adds New Words.  In the article, Merriam-Webster president and publisher John Morse talks about some of the decision-making behind introducing new words into Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. Some words, he says, “face years in limbo as wordsmiths wait to see if they are just fads.” Among the 100 new words that made the cut are frenemy, locavore, and webisode.

 I especially like this picture of Morse thumbing through “some of the 16 million index cards of historic words” at Merriam-Webster headquarters. There are still places–including my office–where index cards store a lot of history.

The Merriam-Webster site lists more new words that have been added to the eleventh edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary and Merriam-Webster Online.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 9th, 2009 at 7:51 am and is filed under In the News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.