On Aug. 27, The Economist blog posted an article about how dictionaries choose which words to include and how this differs between print and online dictionaries. The post was prompted by Oxford Dictionaries’ additions earlier this month. The post quoted Erin McKean, a lexicographer formerly of Oxford and now of Wordnik, an online dictionary, who compared dictionary-makers to fishermen who seek to record words in active use rather than differentiating between “good” words and slang or neologisms.
