On Language
Sorry, Webster. Most People Don’t Want Internet Slang in the Dictionary.
Does internet slang belong in the dictionary? Last month I received a news release from a language-learning platform called Preply, which surveyed 1,524 Americans on this question and found 61 percent saying no: They did not want to see “6-7” or “skibidi” in the nearest Merriam-Webster. The youngest respondents were most opposed, followed by the oldest. Those between 25 and 54 — years often spent pretending you still follow everything younger people are saying — were only slightly warmer.
Preply blames this antipathy on a misunderstanding of what dictionaries are for. “People often think that when a word enters the dictionary, it has received some kind of official approval,” says Madeline Enos, one of Preply’s language experts. “But that isn’t the role dictionaries play. Modern dictionaries record how people actually use language.” That’s certainly how the people who build today’s dictionaries tend to see themselves — as neutral documentarians, not “gatekeepers of ‘official’ English,” as Enos puts it.
You might also blame marketing: Corny slang makes news. I doubt you heard about the Oxford English Dictionary’s adding “nihonium” or “lutefisk” this summer — but you may have heard that its 2025 Word of the Year was “rage bait,” which inherited the title from “brain rot,” “rizz” and “goblin mode.” Last fall, Merriam-Webster announced a new print edition of its Collegiate Dictionary with more than 5,000 fresh entries; the ones singled out, in both promotional materials and the news stories that followed, were things like “dad bod” and “adulting.” Public imagination is not captured by “hybridogenetic” or “papgeld” or “snob” as a verb — what gets attention is “beige flag,” “cheugy” or “thot” hitting institutions that people still imagine reeking of pipe smoke and damp tweed.
I’m not sure Enos is strictly correct, though, about the role dictionaries play. Yes, we use them to understand what others are saying. But we also consult them to check that we’re spelling and using words “correctly,” even to settle bets and arguments. (The last time Enos opened a print dictionary, she told me, was “during a rather contentious family Scrabble game in the mid-2010s.”) Sometimes we seek gatekeeping — which I’m guessing is at least part of why people hesitate to imagine flipping past “moots” and “menty B” when trying to proofread résumés.
Plus a lot of that ephemeral online language barely even feels like “slang”: It’s too malleable, too referential, too yoked to cultural trivia. Sure, some new words have durable, dictionary-ready meanings, like the longstanding use of “thirsty” to capture social desperation or the fantastic “meat proxy” for someone who passes along A.I. work without reading it. But “goblin mode” (an embrace of slovenly, antisocial behavior) was more metaphor than neologism, and very obviously the sort of joke the internet exhausts and abandons within months. Preply’s roundup of this year’s top slang includes “the saxophones are getting louder,” a straightforward, full-sentence reference to an ominous musical cue from the film “Boyz N the Hood” — is that really slang?
These things really do need to be recorded somewhere, assuming we want our descendants to be able to parse the oceans of digital text we leave behind. Future historians will need to know what “skibidi” was, lest they mistake it for a protest movement or an obscure slur; they will need to decode countless dumb jokes and political dog whistles to make sense of old Elon Musk tweets for their magisterial studies of the feudal system on Mars. Social media from less than a decade ago already presents interpretive challenges, even for the terminally online.