What 'fly' means to you may not be mom's definition
"Why do we use the words that we do?," asked Jennifer Blum, 11, a sixth-grader at West Oak Middle School in Mundelein.
The study of words is called lexicology. A dictionary, which lists all the words we use, is called a lexicography. Words are constantly being recycled, re-defined and re-used, and inventions prompt the creation of new words. Your parents thought "fly" meant to soar in the air, but you know that it also means you look really good. Your grandmother couldn't have known about DVDs was when she was your age -- they weren't invented.
Nathan Bierma, who writes the "On Language" column in the Chicago Tribune, said, "We tend to use the words that we hear from our friends and read in books. Keep listening, and you'll keep hearing new words."
The very first American dictionary was published in 1806 by Noah Webster with a total of 37,000 words. Today's unabridged Merriam-Webster online dictionary is 15 times that size.
Dictionary publishers like Merriam-Webster and the Oxford University Press, which distributes the Oxford English Dictionary, monitor new words that are used frequently enough to be entered into future editions of their books. They research newspapers, journals, books, Internet sites, blogs, chatrooms, watch movies and listen to people on the radio and on television. A master list of language is compiled that draws together American English, British English and other forms of English.
Oxford assembles a master word list, called the Corpus, that lists two billion words. Analysts select words that are used often and check for the most common spelling of that word. The search yields about 10,000 word additions to the online version each year.
About that word "fly." Using it as a noun -- there's a fly in my soup -- the definition can be traced back to the year 950. You might think that the adverb -- those pants are really fly -- which was added to the dictionary in 1977, is the first re-use of the word. But back in 1852, the author Charles Dickens re-defined fly to mean smart. In his book, "Bleak House," one of his characters said, "I am fly."