It turns out, many, many words in English don’t have a dictionary definition. Lexicographer Erin McKean and her team at Wordnik are on a mission to change that.
Did you know that 52% of the unique words of English aren’t in major dictionaries?
In 2010, Harvard researchers published findings in the journal Science that began to quantify the number of definition-less words in English. Using the Google Books Corpus (5 million books, 361 billion words) and comparing samples to major dictionaries (including the Oxford English Dictionary [OED] and the Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary [MWD]), the researchers estimated that, in fact,the majority of the words used in English books are the equivalent of “lexical ‘dark matter,’ undocumented in standard references.”
Here’s why: Traditional dictionaries just can’t keep up with the size and scope of English. Mostly that’s because dictionary definitions are very difficult to write. A very talented editor may write seven entries in a day, or she may need weeks to describe just one word.
At Wordnik, we believe that every word should be lookupable. We’re currently on a hunt to find and add a million of these “missing words”. But instead of writing our own definitions (a process that doesn’t scale), we’re using text-mining and machine-learning techniques to find definitions that have already by written. We call these naturally-occurring definitions “free-range definitions”, or “FRDs” (pronounced “freds”).
Here are 20 of our favorite “missing words” and the free-range definitions we’ve found for them.
1. aeroir
“The concept of terroir will be familiar to most Edible Geography readers; recently, we also explored the idea of ‘merroir,’ or tasting place in sea salt. But what about aeroir — the atmospheric taste of place?”
2. agalmics
“Agalmics is an approach to (or more properly, perhaps, an alternative to) economics which acknowledges that non-scarce goods will always be copied, whether legally or illegally: ‘With our information technologies copying data is the easiest thing in the world, so it would be foolhardy to try to fight it.’”
3. agender
“The term “agender” means to express one’s gender outside of the male and female genders.”
4. anachronym
“At first glance, it seems it may be turning into what linguist Ben Zimmer calls an ‘anachronym,’ a word or phrase that remains in usage even as behaviors change.”
5. bettabilitarianism
“This is consistent with Oliver Wendell Holmes’ ‘bettabilitarianism,’ his answer to utilitarianism; every time we act, we effectively make a bet with the universe which may or may not pay off.”
6. biketender
“Tomorrow and Saturday, a bicycling bartender, or ‘biketender,’ will deliver cocktails you order up via the Uber app.”
7. champing
“The Churches Conservation Trust in the United Kingdom has introduced a new slow-tourism escape it calls “champing”—a play on words for camping in churches.”
8. dronie
“The latest self-portrait craze to grip the narcissists of the internet are called dronies – and involve using a remote-controlled aircraft to snap images.”
9. egregore
“A Christian friend pointed me to the concept of an egregore — ‘an autonomous psychic entity made up of, and influencing, the thoughts of a group of people.’”
10. firenado
“The swirling inferno that you see there is called a firenado, basically a tornado on the ground with smoke and flames shooting up from inside of it.”
11. hyperloop
“The hyperloop, you may recall, is a transportation concept pitched in 2013 by industrialist Elon Musk, in which passenger or cargo capsules shoot through tubes at speeds of up to 750 miles an hour.”
12. letterlocking
“She has coined the word ‘letterlocking’ to describe methods of folding and gluing pages to deter snooping.”
13. overchoice
“In Future Shock, [Alvin] Toffler coined the term “overchoice”, predicting that consumers would face an increasing range of choices as sellers continually try to differentiate themselves.”
14. philanthropreneur
“In practice, the philanthropreneur applies practical and entrepreneurial approaches to the pursuit of philanthropy.”
15. sneckdown
“A sneckdown is a curb extension caused by snowfall that shows where a street can be narrowed to slow cars + shorten ped crossing distances.”
16. sordophone
“Earlier today, we asked for help coming up with a word for that thing where a word is innocent in its native language, but sounds like a dirty word to foreign speakers. And not only did we come up with a word — “sordophone” — but also, a pretty impressive list of words that travelers should be careful about saying.”
17. sprummer
“Mr Entwisle has proposed “sprummer” – the season between spring and summer – and “sprinter” – an early spring.”
18. supertasker
“The term “supertasker” is given to individuals able to successfully accomplish two or more tasks at once — a quality possessed by less than 2.5 percent of people.”
19. typogram
“A typogram is a word that, through the manipulation of the letterform itself, illustrates the meaning of the word.”
20. zemblanity
“Zemblanity, the opposite of serendipity, the faculty of making unhappy, unlucky and expected discoveries by design.”
In our hunt for a million missing words, we may find more than a few that are“madeupical” or nonce formations (words which are coined by one person, but which never get more widely used). But we think every word deserves a chance to be better known!
DON’T KILL
YOUR LANGUAGE
The world may want you to speak English to seem “global” or “sophisticated.” Here’s why you should resist. Preserve your mother tongue!
Suzanne Talhouk speaks Arabic, her native tongue, and she expects her fellow Arabic speakers to respond in kind. But she lives in Lebanon, where daily conversation drifts between Arabic, English and French — and Arabic often gets left behind. The trend is most pronounced among the nation’s educated elites, where the habit of speaking French and English in private schools hardens into a fashion long after they’ve graduated. In her TED Talk, Don’t kill your language, she warns that what’s lost in translation is not just a word here and there, but a collective voice, a collective memory, a culture’s presence in the world. Using your mother tongue, in short, is nothing less than a civic duty. Here are her four pieces of advice to build pride in your own language.
Don’t conform. Confront. Here’s a characteristic conversation for Talhouk: She asks for a menu in Arabic (qayimat alttaeam). The waiter huffily replies that she can have a menu (the English word) or menu (in French). “Two words made a Lebanese young man judge a girl as being backward and ignorant,” she says — and the prejudice extends beyond restaurants. Arabic, she has noticed, is “not a language for science, research, a language we’re used to in universities, a language we use in the workplace,” she says, “and it definitely isn’t a language we use at the airport. If we did so, they’d strip us of our clothes.”
Buckling under the social pressure to speak in English or French is easy, Talhouk admits, but it’s also short-sighted. “There are many people like me who would reach a stage in their lives where they involuntarily give up everything that has happened to them in the past, just so they can say that they’re modern and civilized,” she says. “Should I forget all my culture, thoughts, intellect and all my memories?” Instead of giving in to the social pressure, Talhouk says that being conscious of it — and consciously defying it — are the best ways to restore the cultural balance.
EMOTIONALLY CHARGED WORDS, ONCE TRANSLATED, LOSE THEIR EMOTIONAL IMPACT.
Expose cultural erosion. “Language isn’t just for conversing,” she says. “Language represents specific stages in our lives, and terminology that is linked to our emotions.” For her audience at TEDxBeirut, she calls to mind the emotionally charged slogan of Lebanon’s 2005 Cedar Revolution. The chant “Hurriyya, Siyada, Istiqlal” (“Freedom, Solidarity, Independence”) reverberated through city streets, and to this day, Talhouk says, it conjures up the scenes of mass protests: “Each one of you draws a specific image in their own mind; there are specific feelings of a specific day in a specific historical period.” Talhouk argues that the words, once translated, lose their emotional impact. “If your son came up to you and said, ‘Dad, have you lived through the period of the ‘freedom’ slogan?’ how would you feel?” Talhouk asks pointedly. For a sense of how someone with English as a first language might feel, consider a famous English expression mingled with Arabic — “God save the malika” instead of “God save the queen,” for instance. Her point: this isn’t just about language, but about culture, society, memory, community.
Drop the “cultural cringe.” Just speaking your language won’t make it fashionable. To build momentum, Talhouk says Arabic speakers must confront the elitists who wince at their word choices. So she founded Feil Amer, a grassroots movement that encourages Lebanese youth to take pride in their mother tongue. The argument is about more than scolding every French or English utterance (even Talhouk says she prefers the English word “internet” to the Arabic alternative,alshabaka, or “world wide web”). Instead, the campaign launched with a slogan meant to highlight the cultural threat: “I talk to you from the East, but you reply from the West.” “After that, we launched another campaign with scenes of letters on the ground,” says Talhouk. “A scene of a letter surrounded by black and yellow tape with ‘Don’t kill your language!’ written on it.”
Above all, get creative. “Every one of you is a creative project,” Talhouk says, urging audience members to use their mother tongues to explore and experiment creatively. She points to one of Lebanon’s internationally acclaimed artists, the writer Gibran Khalil Gibran, who never could have written his inimitable novels in English, she says, without first mastering his native Arabic. “All his ideas, imagination and philosophy were inspired by this little boy in the village where he grew up, smelling a specific smell, hearing a specific voice, and thinking a specific thought,” she says. “Even when he wrote in English, when you read his writings in English, you smell the same smell, sense the same feeling.” So she urges young artists to follow Gibran’s example, and first pour their creative energies into loving and supporting their mother tongue. “A single novel could make us global again. It could bring the Arabic language back to being number one.”
