Here is a question that sounds simple and is not: how does a word get into the dictionary? Most of us picture a committee in a wood-panelled room voting words in and out. The reality is stranger, slower, and much more democratic — and the story of levidrome is a perfect guided tour of how it actually works.
Dictionaries are records, not rulebooks. The great historical dictionaries were built by reading. When James Murray began editing what became the Oxford English Dictionary in 1879, he issued a public appeal for volunteer readers to comb through centuries of books and mail in quotation slips — small paper records of a word being used, with its context and date. Thousands of volunteers responded, including, famously, a prolific contributor named Dr W. C. Minor, who sent in tens of thousands of slips from an asylum where he was confined. The first edition, completed in 1928, rested on millions of these slips: evidence of use, gathered by the public.
Modern lexicography runs on the same principle at industrial scale. Today's dictionary teams maintain enormous text databases — corpora — containing billions of words from books, newspapers, magazines, transcripts, and the web. Editors and software watch these corpora the way meteorologists watch weather systems, looking for new formations: a word that appears suddenly, spreads beyond its birthplace, and keeps being used by people who did not coin it. Merriam-Webster describes its own criteria in roughly these terms: a word earns entry when it shows widespread, sustained, and meaningful use — many people, over a real stretch of time, in real sentences.
Three hurdles, then. Widespread: the word must escape its inventor's circle and appear in the wild, in publications and speech its coiner doesn't control. Sustained: a flash of fame is not enough; dictionaries wait, sometimes for years, to see whether a word is a resident or a tourist. Meaningful: the word must settle into a stable meaning that writers can use without explaining it every time. Words that clear all three get drafted entries, definitions written from the gathered evidence, and a place in the next update. Words that don't are watched a while longer. Nobody is rejected out of snobbery; the file just stays open.
Now run levidrome through the machine. Coined in October 2017 by six-year-old Levi Budd of Victoria, British Columbia, it cleared the first hurdle at remarkable speed: within months it had appeared in the Times Colonist, The Star, CTV News coverage, and international write-ups, and it drew public encouragement from figures including William Shatner — all use by people who did not coin it. Oxford's editors told the family the word was 'well on its way' and set the sustained-use test in plain terms: keep being used, and dictionaries follow. The word has since earned a Wiktionary entry with citations, a mention in a published book, a community list that keeps growing, a lager named from one of its own pairs (lager/regal), and — as of this site — games, a dictionary of pairs, and a journal. Each of those is another quotation slip in the modern file.
It helps to know that this pathway is how many beloved words arrived. Selfie was Australian forum slang before it was Oxford's Word of the Year in 2013 and a dictionary entry after. Shakespeare is credited with popularising hundreds of expressions that began as one writer's coinages. The dictionary door has never been opened by cleverness alone; it opens when a word proves useful to strangers, repeatedly, over time. A levidrome is almost comically well-suited to the test, because the concept is genuinely useful — there was no everyday word for the pattern — and because demonstrating it takes three seconds and a stop sign.
What can a word-lover actually do with all this? Exactly what the Budd family was told to do: use the word, in public, in earnest. Teach it to a class. Print it in a newsletter. Use it in a crossword clue, a headline, a caption. Every sincere use is evidence; every explanation to a new person is distribution. Dictionaries do not admit words because they deserve it. They admit words because the language community has already admitted them, and the dictionary is catching up. If levidrome completes the journey, it will not be because a committee relented — it will be because thousands of people kept finding the word handy. That file is still open, and anyone may add a slip.
For the full origin story, read The Six-Year-Old Who Put His Name in the Dictionary. For the terms lexicographers themselves use, see the glossary — and for the questions visitors ask us most, the FAQ.