Now out in the International Journal of Lexicography, an article I’ve been working on for some time about the emergence of Twitter (as it was) and X (as it wishes to be) as the predominant source of new language evidence in the Oxford English Dictionary.
Here are some highlights and excerpts.
[Download PDF]When I say “new language evidence” I mean new language-evidence, as well as (and even more so) new-language evidence. Since 2018 or so Twitter/X has been the single biggest source of all evidentiary quotations in updates to the OED.
Obviously, as all Twitter quotes are dated 2006 or later, it is even more predominant (in fact, far and away dominant) when only modern quotations are considered.
Twitter/X also dominates various subcategories of language evidence added to the OED in the last ten years, including usage evidence of regional vocabulary (in virtually all regional categories), and of vocabulary marked for register (in all categories other than historical – though interestingly it is still the most prevalent of major sources when it comes to archaic words). Read More