Although some 100 new words have been added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, this one in particular stands out. Why? It's not a real word. Ginormous, an adjective meaning bigger than gigantic and bigger than enormous, was actually lauded as the best made-up word by Merriam-Webster in 2005. (Every year, the editors have an online contest and encourage people to submit their favorite words that aren't real.)
"There will be linguistic conservatives who will turn their nose up at a word like 'ginormous,'" John Morse, Merriam-Webster's president, admitted to The Associated Press. "But it's become a part of our language. It's used by professional writers in mainstream publications. It clearly has staying power."
Not so fast! Allen Metcalf, a professor of English at MacMurray College in Jacksonville, Ill., and the executive secretary of the American Dialect Society, begs to differ. "A new word that stands out and is ostentatious is going to sink like a lead balloon," he sniffed to AP. "It might enjoy a fringe existence."
Hold on, there! This is no fringe word. Merriam-Webster can trace "ginormous" all the way back to 1948 when it first appeared in a British dictionary of military slang. And since 2000, Merriam-Webster editors have seen "ginormous" in many newspaper and magazine articles, which is essentially the criteria for making it into the dictionary.
Other notable words that are now in the dictionary:
Bollywood: India's booming motion picture industry, which plays on the word "Hollywood."
Crunk: A style of Southern rap music.
DVR: Digital video recorder.
Gray literature: Hard-to-get written material.
IED: Improvised explosive devices that have become common in the war in Iraq.
Microgreen: A shoot of a standard salad plant.
Sudoku: A popular number puzzle, the aim of which is to enter a number from 1 to 9 in each cell of a 9x9 grid made up of 3x3 subgrids. Each row, column and region must contain only one instance of each number.
Smackdown: Contests in entertainment wrestling.
Telenovela: Latin American soap operas.
--From the Editors at Netscape
