1225. This week, we talk to lexicographer Steve Johnson from Dictionary.com. We look at how slang like "no cap" and "throw hands" works its way up from a separate slang dictionary, why one lexicographer fought against adding "rizz," and where "lost in the sauce" comes from. Then we look at what "overprompting" says about how we talk to AI, why food words like "quesabirria" and "elote" can take years to reach the dictionary, and how the team is starting to size up contenders for word of the year.
1225. This week, we talk to lexicographer Steve Johnson from Dictionary.com. We look at how slang like "no cap" and "throw hands" works its way up from a separate slang dictionary, why one lexicographer fought against adding "rizz," and where "lost in the sauce" comes from. Then we look at what "overprompting" says about how we talk to AI, why food words like "quesabirria" and "elote" can take years to reach the dictionary, and how the team is starting to size up contenders for word of the year.
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Mignon Fogarty: Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty, and today I am here with Steve Johnson, a lexicographer at Dictionary.com. Steve, welcome to the Grammar Girl podcast.
Steve Johnson: Thanks for having me.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, tell us a little bit about your role at Dictionary.com and why you're here today because I hear you have like this big word drop.
Steve Johnson: Yeah, so I'm the director of lexicography for Dictionary.com. So I pretty much kind of run the strategy of which words get added to the dictionary. We just had a major word drop where we added 5,900 new words to the dictionary. So we've been working very, very hard since the beginning of the year to get new words added.
Mignon Fogarty: Why was this one so big? Were there so many new words, or was there something that made it more possible for you to do so many more this time?
Steve Johnson: No, that's a great question. One of the things that we've been really focused on over the last few years is making sure to upgrade our tech so that we really have the time for our lexicographers to focus on what they do best, which is really focusing on the new words, rather than how to input them, worrying about different types of tagging, and any of the tech issues that can come up and just take a lot of time. Just really getting a lot of words that are out there that we had, you know, a backlog that we were waiting to release.
Mignon Fogarty: What was the most surprising theme across this year's new words?
Steve Johnson: I think that probably one of the most surprising themes for me is just looking at how many different areas vocabulary is coming from. So we have a lot of words that are coming from health, from medicine, from science, technology, a lot of things with AI, but we also have, you know, things related to relationships, food, slang. So just really telling the story about how everyone is experiencing the world.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, how is social media and AI sort of changing what you're seeing in the words that people are using, or is it not?
Steve Johnson: Well, I think social media is pretty interesting because a lot of the words that we have are based on our kind of digital experiences that we have. It could be anything from having like a "reply guy" in comments, it can be, you know, something like a "face reveal," which is something that we wouldn't be able to do outside of a digital space, because when we're talking to people, we obviously are usually face-to-face. So just having these new terms to describe like new realities that we have socially is where we see a lot of changes.
Mignon Fogarty: There was a new slang term that I, honestly, I would have thought it meant Starbucks. It's "STBX." Like, what does that mean?
Steve Johnson: Soon-to-be ex. Yeah, so like, you see this in a lot of online forums, particularly areas like Reddit, where if you're a part of the community, you pick up on all of these acronyms, but outside of that, it's just, "I have no idea what this means." And so yeah, so that's something where you're describing people kind of shorthand, you know, using an abbreviation, but it's soon-to-be ex.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, I don't use Reddit much, so that explains maybe why I haven't seen that one before. Are there more abbreviations like that that you're seeing lately?
Steve Johnson: Oh yeah, I mean Reddit has its own, like, dictionary of different types of abbreviations. I remember one of the first ones that I remember when I encountered it, I thought it was funny, it's the acronym for "if you know, you know." Because if you don't know what that acronym stands for, you have no idea what it is, and so it's kind of meta in that way. But yeah, so any of those, you know, can be really challenging if you're not in on the inside joke, if you don't actually know what those are supposed to stand for. And makes it really hard to be a user and participate in a forum like that if you don't know these.
Mignon Fogarty: Do you have people who specialize in different areas? Like I know you also have a lot of new words from science and medicine. I imagine it's not the same people working on those words as working on internet slang.
Steve Johnson: Yeah, so we definitely have lexicographers that have specializations. One of our lexicographers like focuses on a lot of the science terms, and she loves working through like the set of science. In particular, I really like working on the science vocabulary since I came through—I started in chemical engineering before I turned to linguistics, and so I really, in particular, like a lot of kind of the chemistry-related terms. Allows me to look at my past somewhat.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, I was a biologist before I came to language, and I noted that biology terms were the biggest chunk of the new science and medicine, and it did make me wonder, like, are there more new words in biology this time, or did you just have like a backlog of biology words?
Steve Johnson: We were just focusing on trying to get a lot of the words that are out. We found a lot with probably biology and also mental health terms that have been particularly popular, and so sometimes things just kind of come and go with the trends.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. Well, let's actually go back to slang, because everyone always thinks that's really fun. Is there anything noticeably different about the online language or slang you've seen this year compared to previous years?
Steve Johnson: Compared to previous years, I think that generally matches what we normally get. However, one of my favorite things is when you have a slang expression and it starts to kind of continue to change in form and grow. So we had "chonky," for example, which is a very cute like, you know, term adjective for a pet, but then you have like "chonker," and then you have "chonk." And so like how that derives afterwards, I think is really interesting, and so I think that those just make for fun moments. But then a lot of multiword expressions that have just had sticking power when they don't normally. So "lost in the sauce" is one of my favorites that we added in this kind of round. It's been around for a while, but it's just one of those that's fun and just had staying power.
Mignon Fogarty: Tell people what it means.
Steve Johnson: So if you're "lost in the sauce," it's like when you're clueless or confused, it could be disoriented. It's something that, you know, is kind of connected to being inebriated if you've drunk too much, had too much.
Mignon Fogarty: Oh, the sauce. Yeah.
Steve Johnson: Had too much sauce. Yeah.
Mignon Fogarty: I would not have made that connection. That's great. Is that where it comes from?
Steve Johnson: Yeah. So like "sauce" being a slang term for like liquor.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, nice.
Steve Johnson: And so you have like related expressions like "off the sauce" and stuff like that as well.
Mignon Fogarty: Fun. It seems like slang words are being added to the dictionary more than they used to be, and I did see someone last week say like, "I don't want slang in my dictionary." And I'm like, well, I don't know, I kind of do. But like there's this feeling that some people, like maybe some of the slang is moving too fast. Like how do you decide what slang should go in the dictionary and how much slang you're going to put in there?
Steve Johnson: Yeah, so I think that when looking at slang, it's always moved really fast, and that's one of the characteristics of it. I think that the biggest difference that we're seeing is that people can notice it now, especially when you're looking at trends like and platforms like TikTok, where you just have a lot of users that are able to share things much more rapidly in the past. When coming up with words to add to the dictionary, it's actually pretty challenging, because we have a finite number of lexicographers, you know, finite number of hours in our week, and so we do have to prioritize which words, you know, we want to add. And, you know, it's not an easy task or an easy job, but really when it comes down to it, we want to make sure that anything that we add, first off, it has to be something that's used by a lot of people, it has to be something that has a, you know, pretty fixed meaning amongst the different groups of people, and we want it to be something that's going to be useful to a general audience. And it's that kind of feature of it being useful, and then of course we also want it to generally be something that's long-lasting. And slang can be very ephemeral, so that's where it becomes particularly challenging with slang, figuring out how much staying power does a word have to have before it's like ready to go in the dictionary. And at Dictionary.com, we have actually a slang dictionary for ones that we're not sure whether we want to add this to the regular dictionary yet. And so we do have a cultural dictionary where we add terms where we're not sure, we can reevaluate those, and then we're like, "Yep, this is here to stay."
Mignon Fogarty: Oh, so it's kind of like the minor leagues for words.
Steve Johnson: Pretty much. Yeah, so like one of the ones that we had in kind of that basically that slang dictionary for a while was "throw hands," and you're just like, "Is this going to stay around?" You know, so "throw hands" basically is a slang that means to physically fight. And so didn't know if that was going to stay around or not, so we had that in the slang dictionary, and then it's just like people are still throwing hands years later, so time to add it to the regular dictionary.
Mignon Fogarty: So did most of the slang words that are in the regular dictionary start in the like lesser, just online?
Steve Johnson: Yeah, so a lot of them do start in our cultural dictionary. So "no cap" was a good example. Like, you know, we had this because lots of people were looking it up, like, "What does 'no cap' mean?" I, when I first encountered it, I could not have even guessed what it meant. So for those that don't know, like "no cap" is a slang that means "honestly, no lie, no exaggeration." And so without knowing what it is, you have to look it up, and that's what we have the dictionary for. And so we wanted to make sure that it was there so that it could be useful. We didn't know how long it would be around, so we put it in the slang dictionary, and then it's just like, well, this is still being used regularly, time to move it to give it its proper place.
Mignon Fogarty: I wonder if like internally you have bets or, you know, you should have like a pool about which words are going to make it from the minor league up to the major league dictionary.
Steve Johnson: Oh yeah, some of the lexicographers on the team, we definitely have things that—there's sometimes resistance among some of us. So my colleague Anna, she really did not want "rizz" added. You know, so "rizz" is short for "charisma." It's used a lot with Gen Alpha, and she was just, "Do not add 'rizz' to the dictionary, don't do it." And then it just had that staying power, and so it's just like, okay, it's going to be added.
Mignon Fogarty: So is it a committee decision for every word like that?
Steve Johnson: Not every word. We regularly just look at a lot of data. So we generally have two main sources of data that we can look at. So one, we can look at just the frequency of words in corpora, and we'll look at change of frequency over time, and so you can generally see like this word is just appearing more and more frequently across different types of publications, and so that's a pretty good signal that it's time to add a word. Another thing that we can look at is user search data, so we can look at actually what users coming to the site looking for words are actually searching for, and when a word is searched for often enough, it seems to be a clear indication that it's ready to be added, since there's obviously a need or a use for it.
Mignon Fogarty: That's great. Yeah, bringing up words of the year reminds—or the corpora frequency reminds me you always have the words of the year, and I imagine you're starting to look at that now already, right?
Steve Johnson: We are starting to look at that now, yeah. So it's that time of year where, you know, we track starting at the beginning of the year. We actually have a list and we like add more and more words throughout the year, and this is around the time that we start trying to figure out what's going to be on our shortlist. I had noticed that one of your podcasts the other day had "maxxing" as the topic, and I mean that's been around, you know, a lot this year, but, you know, there have been so many different types of trends this year. So anything from "Odyssey" being out because of the movie, things like "data centers" being, you know, in the news a lot, so we still also have an election coming up, so if there are any October surprises, we often get political words that enter into the race kind of last minute.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. When's sort of the cutoff date for picking?
Steve Johnson: We try to—you know, it just depends year to year. Like some years it's a very clear choice because of the way things were trending. So last year when we chose "67" as word of the year, it had been just huge, like starting at the beginning of September, just like really took off and it was just not losing steam, and so it seemed like a very obvious choice. The year before that, "demure" like was definitely had been on the rise through the summer, things were very cutesy, things were very demure, and so we had a pretty good indication, but there were also, you know, like "brat summer" from Charli XCX, so, you know, there were a lot of contenders that year, but last year it was really clear, so we try to see how things are going to go by around mid-October.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. I know you won't tell me the word or even the ones in contention, but it feels to me like there's not such a clear choice this year. Is that right?
Steve Johnson: Yeah, this year has been interesting, because like there's generally the same sources, so you have things that come from like politics, you have things that come from slang, because those are really what you see a lot in the news, it's what's affecting people day-to-day. But yeah, I feel like there hasn't been nearly as strong of a term as there was like last year. Like "67" was just overwhelmingly everywhere, so yeah, we'll see. Have about another month and a half.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. Well, we'll be watching! What are some of your other favorite words from this new word drop?
Steve Johnson: So I really love "Star Wars," and so there was "Padawan" that we added to the dictionary. I like "Lord of the Rings," so we added "Balrog," and so those are two of my favorite terms coming from like those kind of fandom communities, so to speak. But I also thought that it was really interesting, some of the AI terms. So "AI slop" has been around, that's been increasing in usage, kind of formalizing it as its own term in the dictionary is one that we had. But a lot of the different language that's describing our interactions with technology and with AI specifically, I think have been really important. So for example, "overprompting" is one of the terms that we had, and one of the reasons that I really like this term is because it really shows what our human impulse is. So for overprompting, it's what happens when basically you provide artificial intelligence with an excessive amount of instruction and it gives more and more negative output, because if something isn't working, you're like, "I just need to tell it more, I just need to give it more instruction." And so what ends up happening is you're creating this like feedback loop where you're like putting more in and getting something worse and worse out, and so it's, I think, an interesting experience for how we're like learning to navigate and use AI kind of as a tool and having a term to describe that.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, that is interesting. And, you know, I know some people are concerned about AI sort of leveling language, you know, if we're seeing so much AI output, it's all kind of very has a very sameness to it, and also you can like imagine the different models have their own styles almost, you know, so you're always hearing like, "That's on me," or, you know, "That's a load-bearing question," or something like that, and then these phrases that appear over and over again in AI output. You know, are you seeing anything in your data that seems to be influenced by AI?
Steve Johnson: I think that that's just a—one, an interesting question, but I think that as you have more that's the same, this is like really where you see the role of creativity and why it's so important to be creative, and I think that that's also why things like the Gen Alpha slang that people think is really crazy, you know, "skibidi," for example, is why it stands out so much because of how creative it is. And so I think that there's going to be a lot of pushback, you know, towards, you know, fighting against that conformity, which, you know, there regularly is. So I think that that's like really where we really shine with creativity is with slang.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, I hope so. So you're not really seeing any sort of leveling in the kinds of words that people are searching for, it sounds like.
Steve Johnson: Not yet, not yet. So I think that we have plenty of time before that happens.
Mignon Fogarty: Super. Yeah. Oh, and I was looking back at my notes. You also had a lot of borrowings this time, and I want to try a—what is it? A quesa?
Steve Johnson: Quesabirria.
Mignon Fogarty: That sounds delicious!
Steve Johnson: Yeah, so, yeah, I live in San Diego, and so I'm all about the food, and we have just amazing Mexican food being, you know, so close to the border, so yeah, quesabirria is particularly delicious.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, and what are some of your other favorite borrowings that are in there?
Steve Johnson: So a lot of the borrowings that we had were really from food, and so it's like around lunchtime, so now I'm going to get hungry, but, yeah, so it's just one of those things that you can have a lot of food terms in particular that for whatever reason just take a while, even if they're very popular. So here we have "elote," which is corn, it's a kind of a street corn dish that I think is absolutely delicious, but even something as simple as like "garlic knots" exists forever, but like just noticed that it was missing from the dictionary, decided that it was time to add it. So we get a lot of words around lunchtime from our lexicographers. It's like, "You know we don't have this in the dictionary?" It's like, "What are you searching for?"
Mignon Fogarty: Making your lunch order. Yeah, wonderful. Well, when, I know like you just finished, but when will your next word drop be?
Steve Johnson: Yeah, so, you know, it's a little bit different every year, but we usually have it around, you know, before the holidays hit, so just have to wait and see.
Mignon Fogarty: Okay, great. Well, thank you so much for telling us about these new words today. It's always fun to hear about them. Is there anything else you'd like to share with people about what they should be looking for in updates or how they can use the dictionary?
Steve Johnson: Yeah, I mean, I think that one of the things that people kind of don't realize is that, you know, anytime we have a new word in the dictionary, it's not necessarily new. It's something that's generally been a while, it just takes a while for it to get enough usage and update, but really anyone can create new words, so I'm very big at encouraging, you know, people to, you know, make their own neologisms, especially with your group of friends. Like use it amongst not only yourselves, but, you know, use it with others. A lot of people tend to keep a lot of words in the group, but, you know, everyone has the ability to impact and change the English language, which is pretty amazing.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, we call those "familects" or "friendilects" on the Grammar Girl podcast. We play them at the end of all my scripted shows, and actually, listeners, we need more. I need more familects or friendilects, so send those in. The instructions on how to do that will be in the show notes. Thanks for like queuing that up for me, Steve.
Steve Johnson: It's like one of the things that I've added to my friends group is the word "shonky," which came from Australian slang. Have you heard of this before?
Mignon Fogarty: No.
Steve Johnson: So it basically kind of fits where the word kind of like "janky" ends, where something is of like dubious or low quality, and it's kind of like sketchy and questionable, but instead of using it for like inanimate objects, it could also like refer to a person. So for example, if you're working with a contractor who tapes up a door that's broken and it's fixed with like tape, you might say that that door is janky, but the contractor that did the work, he's a little shonky.
Mignon Fogarty: Oh, nice. Nice. I like it. Okay, well Steve Johnson from Dictionary.com, thank you so much for being here.
Steve Johnson: Thank you.
Mignon Fogarty: And if you're a Grammarpaloozian, we're going to have a bonus section where we're going to get Steve's book recommendations, so look for that in your feed. If you'd like to become a Grammarpaloozian and get those bonuses right away, you can sign up at Patreon.com/grammargirl. That's all. Thanks for listening.