Are Words Not in a Dictionary Really Words?

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Susan from Reno, Nevada.

Hey, Susan, welcome.

Hi, Susan, what’s up?

Thank you.

I am the director of a nonprofit. We’re a school for adults, and every year our annual fundraiser is a spelling bee we call Spellbinder. And every year we choose a different theme. This year was the Harry Potter book series and the writings of J.K. Rowling. Last year was Alice in Wonderland.

And the words that are chosen for the spelling bee are, and this is spelling bee for adults, not children, the words are chosen from the writings of the author or from those specific books. And somebody asked me the question, are these real words if they’re not in the dictionary? And do you have an opinion on that?

I believe that they are because they are what the author wrote, what the writer had in mind when they wrote the book. And they have to spell it the same way that the writer did in that book. So they get materials to prepare for it. They’re just told the words will come from, for instance, this year, any of the books in the Harry Potter series or any word associated with J.K. Rowling.

Oh, I see. So you could have pulled words from the Cormoran Strike novels?

This year we just stayed with the Harry Potter books.

Okay, so any book in that series, any word in any of those books.

Wow. Because I know a lot of times when people are preparing for spelling bees, you get a list. Or they make their own list. A lot of times you don’t get the list because that’s cheating, isn’t it?

To get the list?

No. Like a huge long list.

Oh, I see. And then you just memorize all those words.

But gosh. To learn the entire books. So Harry Potter books have the Latin spell names. They have the strange creature names. A lot of many of the people have unusual names.

Wow. Okay. Does it include proper nouns in there, too?

Absolutely.

Okay. So if she capitalized it in the middle of a sentence, then that’s the way. And we give the speller the word and then the word in that very sentence. And then we repeat the word again.

Okay. And have you had the spelling bee already or you’re going to?

We had it a couple of weeks ago.

Okay. And how’d it go?

It went great. Everybody wore costumes and they had a great time. And the word that took out quite a few people that surprised me was minuscule.

Really? Because she spelled it M-I-N-U-S-C-U-L-E.

Oh, she did.

Yeah, in the Prisoner of Azkaban. And how is that used in a sentence?

I’m sorry, I don’t have that right in front of me right now. I mean, was that one of her puns, like minuscule?

No, it was just a descriptive word. But everybody spelled it M-I-N-I.

Well, yeah, it would have taken me out. M-I-N-U-S-C-U-L-E, that’s how she spelled it?

Yes.

All right. That’s one of the spellings of it.

Yeah, it can be spelled either way, according to the dictionary I’m looking at.

Yeah. Yep. Your question, Susan, is do these words count? Are they real words? And you said yes, and I agree with you.

So do I. And so does Martha. And anybody who studies language will tell you, anybody, whether they’re a linguist or a lexicographer or something else, computational linguist, that a word does not need to be in a dictionary in order to be a legitimate, real word that anyone can use any time that they like. It need only be able to be said, to be written, and to have a meaning. That’s it.

Wow. Sometimes it doesn’t even have to be written. So it has to have a meaning and be able to be uttered. And therefore, it is automatically a word.

Wow. That’s interesting. Now, the thing is people always say, well, what if I just say, blah? Well, does it have meaning in your house? Maybe it doesn’t, you know? Sometimes we do have these exclamations and interjections and utterances that don’t really sound like words, but like, huh, that’s got some meaning to it. Is that a word? But it turns out some dictionaries do include a form of it. And then if it were in a spelling bee, what would be the correct spelling of it?

Right, exactly. So one of the really strange things about people’s misunderstanding of dictionaries is that they often talk about the dictionary like there’s one grand universal monolithic work. And I have on my phone and on my computer just for my daily work, like nine or ten dictionaries, and I can search them all at once. And not every dictionary has every word.

So if Collins has it and Chambers doesn’t, is it a word? You know, you would run into that problem. But the larger question is here is how many words can you fit into a dictionary? There’s no dictionary that has all the words for one thing. Even the Oxford English Dictionary is far short of all the words. So did she write it? Did it get printed? Does it have meaning? Did it change the understanding of the sentence? It is automatically a word.

That’s great. So what’s next year?

You know what? We haven’t chosen a theme yet.

Do you have any ideas?

Poetry of Walt Whitman. He has such crazy use of language. It’s wonderful.

Oh, that’s good. But a lot of people can’t really sink their teeth into poetry, so I don’t know about that.

Or maybe the short stories of Mark Twain.

Oh, that’s a good one. That would be perfect because he spent a lot of time in Virginia City, Nevada, as you know.

That’s right. Yeah, he did.

There you go. I love that idea.

Yeah, maybe just throw all of Twain in there and see what you can get. He’s got some wonderful dialect stuff, particularly the stuff he wrote about the Mississippi. A lot of apostrophes.

A lot of apostrophes. That could be tricky, too.

Susan, thank you for your call. We really appreciate it.

Thank you so much.

Take care now.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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