Defining the Obvious, Or Not

Authors

Emily Furner, Brigham Young University
William Eggington, Brigham Young University

Keywords

new words in publications, American English, definitions

College

Humanities

Department

Linguistics and English Language

Abstract

When a new word premieres in a publication in the English language, the word is normally followed with a definition (hereafter gloss) that defines or restates its meaning¹. But generally, words will eventually stop being defined as readers come to understand the meaning of the word. In other words, when readers “accept” a word into their vocabulary, the practice of including definitions with newer words becomes unnecessary. In this study, I explored the possibility of using corpora to determine when words stop appearing with definitions, thus signaling when these new words became “accepted” into American English.

Recommended Citation

Furner, Emily and Eggington, William (2016) "Defining the Obvious, Or Not," Journal of Undergraduate Research: Vol. 2016: Iss. 1, Article 138.
Available at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/jur/vol2016/iss1/138