Is the word “awesomepants” part of the English language? Don’t worry if you haven’t heard of it; almost no one has. It probably came into existence because “awesome,” meaning really good, has become so over used. In the past few years, enthusiastic types have begun adding “pants”—as in the American word for trousers—as an intensifying suffix. It crops up on Twitter a few times a day.
Does this level of usage make it a real word? Not by any traditional yardstick. It’s not one of the 650,000 or so words in the OED. Yet some time in the past year, one of the isolated uses of “awesomepants” was netted in a lexicographical trawl of the web. The software that spotted the word is busy populating a new kind of online dictionary. It’s called Wordnik and it is the work of Erin McKean, an editor who used to compile American dictionaries for Oxford University Press. Other finds include “smizing”—smiling with your eyes—and “spoofy,” as in spoof-like. Wordnik went online early this year and does not yet work as well as McKean would like. But if her ambitions are realised, it could be the most comprehensive dictionary ever created.
Wordnik has no print edition, so there are no constraints on the number of words it can contain. At the time of writing, “awesomepants” was one of around 4m entries. Some were imported from traditional sources, such as the ten-volume Century Dictionary of 1914. Others come from archives of blog posts and newspaper copy.
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[...] article in Prospect Magazine (sorry the link only gives you the first few paragraphs, but enough to get the idea. And I do [...]