Updates to dictionaries take place regularly enough that it seems like someone is always grumbling over this word or that phrase being included in that most esteemed place we think of when we think of words—”friend with benefits” is in the OED, really? Well, yes. But sometimes the lexicographers themselves are surprised by what they find in the updates, too. Merriam-Webster’s Kory Stamper writes today on the dictionary’s blog, “That was my experience when I was looking through some of the new entries we’ve added to the New Unabridged and stumbled across anyhoo, an informal and humorous synonym of the sentence adverb anyhow.” (She was not just surprised, she was thrilled: “I blinked, then cooed: I grew up using anyhoo, and finding it in the New Unabridged was like seeing a long-lost childhood friend on the subway.”)

Stamper and her colleagues have been working on revisions to the New Unabridged for “years now”—the update, which is behind a paywall, went live in March, she tells me. In the future the edition will get regular updates a few times yearly, including not just new vocabulary but also “usage notes, some dates of first written usage, expanded example sentences, and we now allow subscribers the chance to actually see some of the raw data we use in writing definitions.” If you are a dictionary nerd like I am, this may make you rather light-headed. More.

See: The Atlantic Wire

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