ABOUT NEW WORDS

Fractangle is a new word, though it's less new than it used to be.

New words appear all the time. Some last, and some don't; some make it into dictionaries, and some don't.

Who decides? Once upon a time, I did. For more than 25 years I worked as a freelance lexicographer – researching, writing and editing text for dictionaries, thesauruses and other language books.

As part of this strange and interesting work, for a while I sat on a body that called itself the New Words Committee. We met about once a month to decide which new words (and which new senses of existing words) would go into which dictionaries.

Here are a couple of examples of the oddly compelling, compellingly odd mind-games involved.