Getting L33t Into the Oxford English Dictionary

arcticstoat writes "A few net-speak acronyms such as LOL and OMG were entered to the Oxford English Dictionary last month, but could we ever see l33t-speak (complete with numbers) or ROFLcopters in the OED? In this interview with OED principal editor Graeme Diamond, he reveals the selection criteria for new words and discusses the potential for words such as 'l33t' to get into the dictionary. 'L33t is obviously a respelling and a contraction [of elite],' says Diamond, 'so it would be a separate entry, and yes it is familiar to me, so I think it's something we would consider for inclusion.'"

Comments

Re:Oh dear God, no. NO.

[grub]

I was going to agree with you but then realized your username could be written as 70lk13n and calmed down.

Etymology

[brian0918]

Here is the first known use of the term:

Rychard Byschape in his stede Chosyn he wes concorditer And l33t twa yhere bad eftyr.

-- Andrew of Wyntoun, Ðe orygynale cronykil of Scotland c1425

Re:Oh dear God, no. NO.

[AlecC]

If something often appears in written texts, the OED should list it. The idea is that someone encountering an unfamiliar word should be able to use the OED to find what it it means. The OED differs from some other dictionaries in this matter: it is descriptive, not prescriptive. If a word is or was used often enough with a definable meaning in the written corpus, the OED intends to list it.

lemmatisation

[carndearg]

I'm an OUP employee, I work on http://oxforddictionaries.com/ and I sit just over a partition from the OED team so I guess I'm well placed to comment on this one. For a start, it already is in our dictionaries. http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/leet . Unfortunately though they have lemmatised it (rendered it into its simplest form) as the rather lame-sounding 'leet' rather than '1337'. Hey, give them a break, they're English graduates! This probably has a root in their research. Analysing the corpus to find out how much the word is used, they are probably ignoring numbers because their job is to look for words. This infographic showing our inclusion process might be illuminating: http://oxforddictionaries.com/page/newwordflowchart/how-a-new-word-enters-an-oxford-dictionary

Re:lemmatisation

[carndearg]

Damn. Linked to the wrong sense of leet in the post above. Try this: http://oxforddictionaries.com/view/entry/m_en_gb0984830?rskey=7RJxzw&result=2#m_en_gb0984830