BLOG, a contraction of the term “web log,” is the latest geekspeak to enter Merriam-Webster’s Top-10 list of words for 2004.
So how does a word get into a Merriam-Webster dictionary?
According to Merriam-Webster online, it has an army of editors tracking word usage. After scouring published material from the traditional to online publications, new words are marked and put into a computer system. This system is called a citation. Since the 1880s, Merriam-Webster has collected more than 15.7 million examples of words used in context.
In most cases, new words are added to the next edition of the dictionary if it has enough citations. However, in rare cases, a word jumps onto the scene and is both instantly prevalent and likely to last, as was the case in the 1980s with AIDS.
John Barger coined the term “web log” in December 1997. In 1999, Peter Merholz coined the shorter version “blog.”
Usage of the word spread during 1999 and the word was popularized by Pyra’s creation of their weblog service “Blogger.”
As of March 2003, the Oxford English Dictionary has included the terms weblog, weblogging and weblogger.
Source: Philippine Daily Inquirer
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I still use online journal for nimrodel.net because I started it out in 1996 and blog was unheard of that time. Also, I had gotten so used to that term. Whenever I have a new entry, I label it as an “update” not “blog entry”. Now, BLOGGED is called a blog because it first came out in 2001 .
