LIKE THE wheels of justice, the Oxford English Dictionary moves slowly but with great authority.
A word has to spend years or even decades proving itself before it can be formally admitted to the language. So it is that, after careful consideration, the OED has finally accepted such upstarts as “ego-surfing”, “muffin-top”, and “wags” (as in “wives and girlfriends”) for full membership.
In its latest batch of revisions, the venerable lexicon has also bowed to an annoying modern usage of “heart” as an ironic verbal expression of the non-verbal design used to represent “love” on T-shirt and car-sticker slogans.
The OED notes that as long ago as 1984, somebody somewhere wrote the sentence “I heart my dog’s head” as a joking reference to one such sticker. Now, at last, the dictionary has given its approval.
Other new entries include “tinfoil hat” – referring to a type of headwear believed by some to protect the wearer from covert surveillance – and the “10- (or five- or three-) second rule”, under which food retrieved from the floor within the specified period may be deemed safe to eat.
Among the many new meanings added to old words, meanwhile, the OED has updated the adjective “tragic” to include its usage as an Australian noun, describing “a boring or socially inept person, especially [one] who pursues a solitary interest with obsessive dedication”.
In fact, most of the new entries are under the letter “R”. Since the publication of the second edition in 1989, OED staff have been revising the whole thing again, starting at M and proceeding alphabetically, with occasional sorties elsewhere. The Rs alone have taken three years.
And among the results is that the verb form of “run” has expanded to include 645 different senses, making it the biggest single entry in the dictionary, with twice as many meanings as its nearest rival (the verb form of “put”).
By a happy coincidence, with a certain marriage looming, the latest revisions also include the term “royal we”. Its meaning hasn’t changed, but the first recorded usage has been retrofitted from 1835 to 1821. Confusingly, the phrase was attributed then to that well-known republican, Napoleon, who used it when sending his brother-in-law to St Domingo to revive the French slave trade in 1801.
The new entries will be included from today in the dictionary’s online version, which was relaunched last year. Since then the lexicographers have noticed interesting patterns among users. The single most searched-for word is “dictionary” itself. But the second-most popular search is perhaps less surprising, proving that even on the OED website, many people are just looking for “love”.
