On the Inclusion of Neologisms in Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary (10th edition)

Abstract

Adding neologisms to a dictionary in its revision helps keep it abreast of time, which applies to a learner's one like Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary (10th edition) (henceforth OALD 10), its latest edition. English Learner's dictionaries like OALD 10 get revised regularly. In this arti­cle, the neologisms included in OALD 10 have been approached from different perspectives. In terms of the part of speech, 71.1% of the neologisms are nouns, which could speak for the nouny nature of English. Content words like nouns, adjectives, adverbs and verbs make up almost 96% of the neolo­gisms. Judging by the word-formation, the top three ways to form the neologisms are compound­ing, derivation and blending in decreasing order. According to the form the com­pounds take, which are mostly nouns, the open, hyphenated and tight ones come in decreasing order. 623 com­pounds make up more than half of the neologisms, which provides strong evidence for com­pounding to be the most frequently used way of creating neologisms. For neologisms formed by derivation, most of them are also nouns. However, 170 out of 300 neologisms formed by derivation have already appeared as derivatives of headwords in OALD 9. For 34 blends, 75% of them are partial in nature, which means at least one word in making a blend is in its full form. When it comes to the new words with regional labels, nearly 80% are labeled as belonging to British and North American usages, a sign of the hidden Anglo-centrism. The status of some words counted as neologisms is questionable, as they have been in use for a very long time. The impact of science and technology on the inclusion of neologisms in OALD 10 is quite visible. There are still many opportunities for further exploration concerning OALD 10. Keywords: neologism, OALD 10, part-of-speech, word-formation, regional label, Anglo-centrism, dictionary revision, sci-tech influence