Terms tech journalists have been using for years have finally found their way into the Oxford English Dictionary.
Well, the Oxford Dictionaries Online, that is, which is good enough for me anyway.
Bitcoin, phablet, hackspace, BYOD and even the rather vague ‘Internet of things’ have made the cut for the ODO – which counted 120 new words in its latest quarterly intake.
Words get included by virtue of being widely used, and lexicographers spend vast amounts of time trawling through an ever-expanding database of usages drawn from web and print sources by the ODO to analyse and identify trends in their noble quest for new words.
Which makes its updated content a reliable and very interesting representation of our changing vocabulary, which is constantly reshaped by popular culture – see supercalifragilisticexpialidocious (adj. extraordinarily good; wonderful).
But as someone brought up to respect the weight (metaphorical in the case of the ODO) of the Oxford English Dictionary, and its final word, as it were, in all matters lexicological, I breathed a sigh of relief that these new acronyms, initialisms, terms and, yes, words, have been given the okay by the dictionary – there was a feeling of I was right, after all…
Now, when will they get around to approving IaaS, SaaS and BPMaaS? Not to mention TCPIP (transmission control protocol internet protocol).
