Defining moments

What links JRR Tolkien, dalgona coffee, and a red post box that still stands outside a home in Oxford? Well, lore, legend and just so many syllables. Check out the story of the Oxford English Dictionary, now in the midst of a Third-Edition overhaul

- Anesha George

Squid Game, social media and a coffee craze came together to contribute one of the newest words in the Oxford English Dictionary. "Dalgona" was added in December. The beverage (2 tbsp each of instant coffee, sugar and boiling water, whipped to a froth) caught on in South Korea but was invented in Macau. It became entirely unavoidable after it entered the world of K-dramas, and then the Korean Netflix series Squid Game.

It's "a perfect example of the speed with which users of English in different parts of the world... can create and disseminate new words which can later find their way into the pages of a dictionary," OED executive editor Danica Salazar said, in a statement. Which makes today a particularly difficult time to be compiling a Third Edition. Work on the TE began in the 1990s. The goal was to produce a fully updated text. The First Edition, after all, was completed in 1928. And the Second Edition (1989) had been mainly a blend of texts (the First Edition and the Supplements of 1972-1986). TE would be a complete overhaul, with researchers fanning out to seek out new words, new usages and new meanings.

By 2000, the work-in-progress Third Edition was available online. It continues to be updated every three months. The revisions are now 55% complete, but the last 25 years have been a balancing act, Fiona McPherson, a senior editor at OED, tells Wknd. The biggest challenge is the sheer volume of material available now.