Blog Is An Official Word

Too Much Free Time

from the constantly-updated... dept

Didn’t we just do this? A couple months back we pointed out that in the latest Oxford English Dictionary there were a bunch of new techie words like “dot-com”, “screensaver” and “search engine” (which seems like two words, but who’s counting?). However, now that the dictionary is actually coming out, there are plenty more articles discussing some of the 3,000 new words that have been added, including plenty of others from the technology world. From Reuters we learn that “egosurf”, “cyberslacker” and “hacktivist” are all officially words. Over at the Associated Press, they’re telling us that “blog”, “mission creep” and “prairie dogging” (again, what’s with the “two word” words?) are words. For those of you who don’t know, “prairie-dogging” is apparently used to describe workers in cubicle farms (is that a word?) who pop their heads up to see what’s going on elsewhere in the office. Amusingly, in spell-checking this post, my spell-checker had problems with many of these words. Too bad the Oxford English Dictionary people don’t set up their list as a web service that my spell-checker can check in real time.