What are some words that are not in the dictionary?

Answer 1

There are more words that do not make it into the dictionary than there are that make it in. These days, the criterion for making it in may often be whether or a given word gets widespread use.

One word listed in a recent news article is "nonversation," meaning pointless conversation. Another is "wurfing," which means Surfing the internet while at work. There is a link below to the news article.

A group of people sometimes uses their own word that no one else knows about. I remember having a group of friends who used the word "stratic," which one defined as "lofty and curvilinear." We applied it to all sorts of things quite thoughtlessly, and found it amusing to see the reactions of people who did not understand the word. Such a word is unlikely to make it into any dictionary.

Not very long ago, I tried to find the definition of the word, "lick," as it is used in music. I think I have nearly thirty dictionaries of various kinds, and it appeared in none of them. I looked in a dictionary of musical terms, but that seemed to have been built around what might be called legitimate terms, that might appear on sheet music. The word lick is widely used among musicians of various types, including jazz and blue grass.

If you think about it, some dictionaries have as many as 250,000 definitions, and some have as few as 20,000. The large dictionaries have many words that will not appear in the smaller.

Also, there are whole classes of words that do not usually make it into dictionaries. I remember reading that there were over 600,000 names of organic chemical compounds. I read that about forty years ago. Now there are probably well over a million, and the great majority of them are not in ordinary dictionaries.