The Information by James Gleick

had grown. (Cawdrey: “ akecorne ,
k
fruit.”)
    Four hundred and two years after the
Table Alphabeticall
, the International Astronomical Union voted to declare Pluto a nonplanet, and John Simpson had to make a quick decision. He and his band of lexicographers in Oxford were working on the
P
’s.
Pletzel, plish, pod person, point-and-shoot
, and
polyamorous
were among the new words entering the
OED
. The entry for Pluto was itself relatively new. The planet had been discovered only in 1930, too late for the
OED
’s first edition. The name Minerva was first proposed and then rejected because there was already an asteroid Minerva. In terms of names, the heavens were beginning to fill up. Then “Pluto” was suggested by Venetia Burney, an eleven-year-old resident of Oxford. The
OED
caught up by adding an entry for Pluto in its second edition: “1. A small planet of the solar system lying beyond the orbit of Neptune … 2. The name of a cartoon dog that made its first appearance in Walt Disney’s
Moose Hunt
, released in April 1931.”
    “We really don’t like being pushed into megachanges,” ♦ Simpson said, but he had little choice. The Disney meaning of
Pluto
had proved more stable than the astronomical sense, which was downgraded to “small planetary body.” Consequences rippled through the
OED
.
Pluto
was removed from the list under
planet n
. 3a.
Plutonian
was revised (not to be confused with
pluton
,
plutey
, or
plutonyl
).
    Simpson was the sixth in a distinguished line, the editors of the
Oxford English Dictionary
, whose names rolled fluently off his tongue—“Murray, Bradley, Craigie, Onions, Burchfield, so however many fingers that is”—and saw himself as a steward of their traditions, as well as traditions of English lexicography extending back to Cawdrey by way of Samuel Johnson. James Murray in the nineteenth century established a working method based on index cards, slips of paper 6 inches by 4 inches. At any given moment a thousand such slips sat on Simpson’s desk, and within a stone’s throw were millions more, filling metal files and wooden boxes with the ink of two centuries. But the word-slips had gone obsolete. They had become treeware.
Treeware
had just entered the
OED
as “computing slang, freq. humorous”;
blog
was recognized in 2003,
dot-commer
in 2004,
cyberpet
in 2005, and the verb
to Google
in 2006. Simpson himself Googled often. Beside the word-slips his desk held conduits into the nervous system of the language: instantaneous connection to a worldwide network of proxy amateur lexicographers and access to a vast, interlocking set of databases growing asymptotically toward the ideal of All Previous Text. The dictionary had met cyberspace, and neither would be the same thereafter. However much Simpson loved the
OED
’s roots and legacy, he was leading a revolution, willy-nilly—in what it was, what it knew, what it saw. Where Cawdrey had been isolated, Simpson was connected.
    The English language, spoken now by more than a billion people globally, has entered a period of ferment, and the perspective available in these venerable Oxford offices is both intimate and sweeping. The language upon which the lexicographers eavesdrop has become wild and amorphous: a great, swirling, expanding cloud of messaging and speech; newspapers, magazines, pamphlets; menus and business memos; Internet news groups and chat-room conversations; television and radio broadcasts and phonograph records. By contrast, the dictionary itself has acquired the status of a monument, definitive and towering. It exerts an influence on the language it tries to observe. It wears its authoritative role reluctantly. The lexicographers may recall Ambrose Bierce’s sardonic century-old definition: “ dictionary , a malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic.” ♦ Nowadays they stress that they do not presume (or deign) to disapprove any particular usage or