There are over 170,000 words currently in use in the English language and about 1000 words get added each year.
These 1000 words can come from different sources, i.e. some could come from new occurrences (COVID-19 is now a word in the Oxford English Dictionary – OED), inventions, or ideas.
As our world changes, sometimes the existing words are not sufficient for what we want to express.
E.g. Karoshi (a Japanese word that means death caused by job-related exhaustion) may not have been relevant outside Japan a few decades ago but can express work-related stress quite effectively today.
Hangry (Hungry + Angry) was first used in 1992 in a short story but was added to the OED in 2015 after the internet popularised it.
The process of adding a word starts with reading — lexicographers (who write and edit dictionaries) read everything written in print including books, magazines, newspapers, blogs, social media posts, product packaging (food cartons, beer bottles, etc.).
While reading, they look for new words, and whenever they come across one, they record it with full context, source information, etc. in a database — this information is called a citation.
The word doesn’t get entry in the dictionary by just a couple of citations — a significant number of citations across varied sources over a period of years are required before a word is added to a dictionary.
In OED, for example, a word is added only if it has been printed at least 5 times in 5 different sources over a period of 5 years.
To ensure a word meets these 3 important criteria (in bold above), the team actively looks for more citations of a newly found word — a search in their database can easily tell them how many citations they have already got.
Sometimes the word is old but it has a new meaning, e.g. tweet (the chirp of a young bird).
In these cases, too, lexicographers look for citations (i.e. tweet = a post made on Twitter) where the word has been used in the new context.
Dictionaries, however, don’t just add words; they also remove words that have not been in use for decades, e.g. Merriam-Webster has removed sternforemost, snollygoster and hodad, etc.
