What's New from A to Z

Thirteen years had passed since the G. & C. Merriam Co. had published its fifth-edition Webster's Collegiate Dictionary. But Americans had not stopped talking. They had talked so much and so freely that they had kept twelve editors busy listening to all the new noises they made. Last week, with the publication of a brand-new edition ($6 and up), a lot of U.S. talk became official.

There are 125,000 entries in the new dictionary, hundreds of them brand-new words. Many are technical words, a record of what has been going on in science and industry. Makers of plastics also make words and expressions for everyday use, and polyvinyl. Since the 1936 edition, the physicists too have been busy producing words and expressions for everyday use, e.g., atomic pile, chain reaction, Einstein equation and fissionable.

Some expressions that might have misled a listener in the early '40s, or sent him fruitlessly to the old Collegiate, are now so well known that people hardly need to look them up. But they are in now--ruptured duck, air sleeve, biological warfare, rocket engine, guided missile, jet propulsion and genocide.

In another field, Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialism has made the grade, and people who have been discussing it can now find out what it means ("a . . . theory of man," says the new dictionary, "which expresses the individual's intense awareness of his contingency and freedom . . ."). Onetime Texas Congressman Maury Maverick's great contribution, gobbledygook, for the verbiage of officialdom, is also there, along with a learned note that it derives from the gobblings of turkeys. F.D.R. had contributed iffy (for questions) and H. L. Mencken ecdysiast (for stripteaser).

The Merriam-Webster editors started collecting words in common use right after their last edition came out. Whenever they spotted or heard a new one, they immediately filled out a "citation slip" on it. Words that didn't get enough slips (e.g., car park) were put back in the file again, perhaps for next time.

Over the years, the editors met frequently, debated what to do about words of prejudice, such as nigger and kike (nigger got in, with the crisp warning: "A substandard term"). Finally, the most specialized new words went out to consulting experts for definition. One of the new dictionary's "youngest" definitions (written by Historian Hans Kohn of Smith College): iron curtain--"a barrier created by censorship, prohibition of free travel, etc , to isolate Russian-controlled territory from outside contact . . ."

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