Over 500 new words were added to the American Heritage Dictionary's fifth edition and the executive editor of that dictionary tells Newsmax how the company decides which ones make the cut.
"It depends on the realm that the word comes from," Steve Kleinedler, of American Heritage Dictionaries, told Ed Berliner on "MidPoint" on
Newsmax TV Wednesday.
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"Sometimes it's very obvious, if a consultant in a specific field says it needs to go in — a good example would be whenever there are new chemical elements that are added to the periodic table, once the board that's responsible for naming those elements makes their decision, in it goes," he explained.
"Most words aren't that cut and dry, though," he said. "So the editorial staff here in conjunction with our consultants, we're always looking at areas in our fields but also areas that are just widely used in the news."
"For example, when you take evidence of these, we call these citations and periodically we go through all the words that we've been looking at and decide, 'Oh, it might be time for this one to go in, this one needs further research,' and we judge them all on a case-by-case basis," he added.
Some of the words that made the cut for the fifth edition include clickbait, dashcam and cosplay.
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