Got in trouble: who and how replenishes dictionaries in the 21st century

What words were added to dictionaries in 2021, how dictionaries are generally updated and why they still do not keep up with our lives - in the material of RBC Trends

Every year, but often imperceptibly, new words fill up our speech. Two years of the pandemic have made this process much more obvious. CORONAVIRUS, vaccines, new realities with lockdowns, masks, remote work and distance learning have given us a lot of new words and phrases. Although there is a tradition in RUSSIA and other countries to choose the word of the year (the words of 2021 in Russia are “vaccination” and “Sputnik”), it does not fully reflect all the trends of language changes. Every year hundreds of new words or new meanings of existing words are added to dictionaries.

Covid-crisis of the Russian language

Institute of the Russian Language named after V.V. Vinogradov Russian Academy of Sciences regularly adds new words to the electronic spelling academic resource "Academos". It is literally a large online spelling dictionary, it is an official publication. For 2021, 163 words were added to it. This does not mean that all of them are new and have not been widely used before. It's just that earlier the spelling of these words was not fixed in dictionaries, but now it is codified.

Some of the words are naturally associated with the coronavirus pandemic:

anti-covid, vaccination, zoom, zoom conference, covid, covid, covid-hospital, covid-crisis, post-covid, PCR and its derivatives (PCR analysis, PCR diagnostics, PCR test).

Other - relatively new - words reflect modern realities, phenomena and technical innovations. Among them, for example:

auto payment, battle, caffeine-free, media fake, multimedia content, multimedia service, post-truth, push-up, self-employment, self-employed, co-borrower, airsoft, transgender.

In 2020, 778 words were added to the dictionary. Among them: wifi, webinar, vegan, game design, glam rocker, dislike, foreign agent, carsharing, coworking, like, lockdown, netiquet (rules of communication on the Internet), repost, retweet, sanitizer, selfie.

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Vladimir Pakhomov, Research Fellow, Institute of the Russian Language named after V.V. Vinogradov RAS, editor-in-chief of the Gramota.ru portal:

Akademos is a unique resource, it is the only academic standard electronic dictionary that is constantly updated and supplemented. There are no other such dictionaries, neither spelling nor explanatory. There are separate projects of enthusiasts who collect dictionaries, for example, vocabulary related to the Internet, but they are not academic.”

Neologisms: vaccine tourism and granfluencer

The Institute for Linguistic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences (OR RAS) annually publishes dictionaries of neologisms. These are not classical dictionaries published in large numbers, but rather a scientific work addressed primarily to specialists. Such annuals have been published regularly since the 1960s.

They include new words, their meanings and combinations, recorded by lexicographers in the course of targeted monitoring of Russian media and Internet materials throughout the year. The dictionary gives an interpretation of neologisms and provides examples of their use in context.

Usually, linguists select 350–450 words from several thousand words for a yearbook. The exception was 2020. The coronavirus pandemic provoked active word creation, and as a result, about 3 thousand words entered the dictionary of neologisms in 2020.

The results of this long-term work are collected on the Russian Academic Neography website. There you can check which words first appeared in Russian-language texts in a particular year.

Irina Kuznetsova, Research Fellow, HEAD of the Russian Language Service, IL RAS:

“Words are recorded according to a certain amount of sources. Of course, it happens that the word appeared earlier and the year of addition is not entirely accurate, but this is the maximum accuracy that can be obtained by existing methods.

The Yearbook of Neologisms for 2021 is not ready yet, it will be released during this year. On the Russian Academic Neography website, you can still find six words added in 2021. Half of them are related to the coronavirus:

vaccine tourism, vaccine tourism, vaccination (meaning vaccination tourism).

The rest of the words are from the sphere of social networks:

audio social network (a social network in which communication is conducted through voice messages; due to the period of popularity of Clubhouse), clubhouseologist (marketing specialist at Clubhouse), granfluencer (a popular user of social networks of the elderly).

“Yearbooks are a prompt response to the language situation,” Kuznetsova emphasizes. - Not all of these words will remain, they can be one-day. Then - once - they were forgotten, they left, they were no longer used.

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If annual dictionaries are snapshots of a language system, then dictionaries spanning 10 or 30 years can give a clearer picture. They include vocabulary that has already "settled" and entrenched in the Russian language. These dictionaries are being prepared for a long time, the last one is dedicated to the neologisms of the 1990s.

Last year, the Russian Academy of Sciences also published a Dictionary of the Russian Language of the Coronavirus Era, which contains about 3,500 neologisms that have enriched the Russian language since the beginning of the pandemic. The dictionary is published in 500 copies and is available on the Internet.

Speaking of neologisms, one cannot fail to note the “Dictionary of the Newest Foreign Words” by E. N. Shagalova, since many new words are borrowed, notes Vladimir Pakhomov. This dictionary, published several years ago, includes socio-political vocabulary, terms from the world of fashion, the names of modern sports, words from the world of cinema, literature, art, words related to sexual orientation, gender, relationships.

Vladimir Pakhomov:

“This dictionary describes the latest borrowings, without giving any forecasts, without regulating pronunciation and spelling. It is certain that many of these words will go away as quickly as they appeared.”

English: Post-Covid and Eco-Alarm

The most status explanatory dictionaries of the English language - Merriam-Webster and Oxford English Dictionary - update their electronic versions regularly throughout the year.

The Merriam-Webster American Dictionary has added 455 new words last year (as of October 2021). Among them there is also a coronavirus legacy, for example:

long COVID (for long-term symptoms that persist weeks and months after recovery, post-COVID), vaccine passport (vaccination passport, vaccination certificate), super-spreader (for an event or place where many people could come into contact with an infected person).

A number of new words are connected with the Internet. For example, digital nomad is a person who works remotely, without being tied to a specific place, combining remote work with travel (that is, literally “digital nomad”). Or deplatform - remove and block a user from a social network or from another Internet platform. Other new words are culinary-themed: fluffernutter (peanut butter and marshmallow cream sandwich), ghost kitchen (synonymous with dark kitchen, a commercial kitchen without a restaurant that prepares food for delivery). In addition, the dictionary includes words from such areas as politics, science and technology.

The Oxford English Dictionary is updated quarterly. Over the past year, about 3,700 additions were made to it: new words, new meanings of existing words, corrections. For example, the dictionary fixed the new meaning of the adjective hybrid - hybrid, in relation to work or study. In the case of a hybrid mode of operation, employees work partly remotely, and partly from the office.

For the first time, the phrases climate crisis (climate crisis) and global heating (global heating) were fixed in the dictionary. The last phrase, as the authors of the dictionary state, is used more and more often instead of global warming (global warming), it emphasizes the contribution of human activity to negative climate change. The Oxford Dictionary also includes the word eco-anxiety - anxiety about the state of the environment.

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How words get into dictionaries

Spelling and explanatory dictionaries are updated in different ways, says Igor Isaev, candidate of philological sciences, DIRECTOR of the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian State Humanitarian University.

Igor Isaev:

“Spelling is not a reflection of a living language, it is a writing system. Writing constantly runs around us in the form of a finished document, it does not need to be additionally verified. If some new spelling trend has appeared, then the spelling commission meets and makes a decision.

And any explanatory dictionaries are the result of observing the living fabric of the language, which cannot be invented, it can only be seen and recorded. An explanatory dictionary is what is happening around us, how vocabulary lives. The main problem of explanatory dictionaries is that they are always the day before yesterday. It is never possible to create an explanatory dictionary at the moment of a real change in linguistic meanings.

According to the expert, all explanatory dictionaries are 5–10 years behind, since the words appearing in them are the result of the work of a large team of people who must “pull” them from the sources along with the context, systematize, and analyze.

Previously, vocabulary groups at the Institute of the Russian Language named after V.V. Vinogradova and IL RAS worked with newspaper clippings and fiction, collected lexemes with examples. These file cabinets were sorted, sorted, analyzed and concluded that a word, for example, had a new meaning. All conclusions must be confirmed by the context in which the word is used.

Now the mechanism of work has changed somewhat. Now dictionaries (as the compilers of dictionaries are called) work with electronic sources. The main and largest is the National Corpus of the Russian Language, there is also the General Internet Corpus of the Russian Language.

“Earlier, the replenishment of dictionaries was carried out by the hands of students and graduate students who re-read books and wrote out contexts. And now this is done as a result of a search query in the corpus,” says Isaev. “It turns out that modern dictionaries are replenished with data much more quickly, but they are always late anyway, because the data needs to be verified.”

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An updated explanatory dictionary is a matter of the future

There are no living, constantly updated, but at the same time academic, normative explanatory dictionaries of the Russian language, emphasizes Vladimir Pakhomov. Such an electronic explanatory dictionary is “a matter of the future”.

So far, in order to see new words in the explanatory dictionary, you need to wait for the publication of its next reprint with additions and corrections. Or, if it is a multi-volume dictionary, wait for the release of a new volume, since such a dictionary has been created over several years or even decades. But at the same time, there is a risk that some of the words that were included in the first or second volumes will already be outdated by the time the later volumes are released.

So, for example, it happened with the word “blank” in the meaning of “empty CD”, which was included in the first volume of the Academic Explanatory Dictionary of the Russian Language, says Pakhomov. The first volume was published in 2016.

Vladimir Pakhomov:

“Ten years ago, when the dictionary was written, the word “blank” was relevant, but in real life it is less and less common. It turns out that the dictionary continues to be published, and some of the words included in its first volumes are already outdated. Words that describe the realities of information technology can become outdated very quickly. Therefore, linguists try to include such words in dictionaries to a limited extent.