gam |
head |
trip |
geekery |
smackhead |
showrunner |
schlumpy |
Mephistophelian |
Kombucha |
trans |
The list of words was not our first draft of neologisms. Rather, what you see is round three or four. All 10 are coming from the June 2013 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary Online. With the dawn of the internet, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) has taken up a new home in the digital world. With no page limit or fear of schlepping an impossibly large manuscript around, the dictionary can be more inclusive than ever before. "Substandard-words" and less commonly used words are now being codified, defined, and given to the masses to use. What's more is that the OED has a specialized team trained to look for up and coming words. These men and women spend hours cataloguing every occurence they can find of wordsthey have not defined. With a fine toothed comb, magazines, newspapers, blogs, and articles are being devoured by these scholars. For each occurence of a new word, they make note. Only when that word has become exceptionally salient is it even considered to be included in the next OED publication. With that being said, for our purposes, we randomly selected (using this website: https://www.random.org/lists/) 10 of the 2013 neologisms to put to the test. Originally, that list contained hyphenated/complex words. However, while scraping Twitter did not recognize our hyphens. This led us to an issue where the compound word could be considered two seperate words appearing together. With no way of controling cooccurrence, we opted to remove compound words from our research.