Oxford Dictionary online tries to keep up

Oxford English Dictionary spells it out for us.

If you’re still calling hundred-dollar bills “C-notes,” your slang is outdated. Try “Benjamins.”

If you have decided to “blooter,” you are about to cry out shrilly, blunder or strike something with great force. (If you’re clumsy enough, you can do all three simultaneously.)

And if you should die before you wake, and have left instructions to be cremated instead of buried, your loved ones will not be left with your ashes. These days they are “cremains.”

So says the latest online edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. While you still can purchase the OED as a 20-volume set of books or CD-ROM, 21st-century lexicographers who really want to keep up are subscribing to www.OED.com for quarterly updates.

Any way you look at it, though, the English language is gigantifying (a verb form of “gigantic” that’s been around, surprisingly, since 1841). Paper, plastic or hyperspace, the OED now lists more than half a million words, which is updated with thousands of new entries every three months.

The OED “is not a moribund, static collection of words,” says Don Myers, senior publicist at Oxford University Press’ New York office. “It’s a constantly evolving lexicon.”

The online edition updates about 2,000 entries per quarter, Myers said, with about 70 percent of those being brand-new terms. The others are modifications or additions to existing definitions.

Recent new terms in the OED online include “supersize,” which now can mean vastly increasing the size of anything – although it must be noted the word is derived from a fast-food meal option that corporations such as McDonald’s already have withdrawn.

“E-learning” – the use of virtual classrooms and the like – probably has more staying power. And “spyware,” the insidious software applications used to monitor our electronic lives, seems here to stay.

How good is the OED? I recently spent several afternoons trying to stump it, plugging in some of the more obscure words I could conjure into the latest CD-ROM edition and the online version.

I even enlisted Kansas City Star art critic Alice Thorson to help me, figuring the mighty Oxford could fall short on specialized art terms.

Thorson fed me “terribilita”; the dictionary spat it back as “awesomeness of conception and execution, originally as a quality attributed to Michelangelo by his contemporaries.” We plugged in “vanitas,” and OED knew the reference was to a type of 17th-century Dutch still-life painting.

My colleague came up with “tenebrism,” and Oxford, haughtily silent as always, displayed the text indicating the dramatic light-and-shade stylings of Italy’s Caravaggio.

Enough of the high, then; let OED try dealing with the low. Over the course of my life, I have come across some slang expressions so degenerate that it has been impossible for me to forget them.

Dear readers, you will have to trust me on this one. I assaulted Oxford with terms I cannot repeat here – not any of the obvious choices like the F-bomb, but rather, a dozen examples of the most awesomely smutty words I’ve gathered from my reading.

Indeed, my enthusiasm got the better of me; Thorson still was standing over my shoulder when I typed out my first and most twisted example. When the dictionary brazenly flashed its definition, my friend remarked, wide-eyed, that it was one she never need have known.

I offer her my apology – not “apologia,” which is more a defense of one’s own opinions or actions rather than an expression of remorse.

For the dictionary, though, no surrender: I thought I’d try a literary reference, “panopticon.” Too easy. The OED knew this word originally applied to Jeremy Bentham’s plan for a circular prison in which the inmates cells’ could be observed by one centrally placed guard – and the dictionary further knew the idea had been seized upon by literary thinkers such as William Hazlitt as a metaphor for any powerful person who took it upon himself to observe others.

Fortunately, on one of the days I was battling the dictionary, I was listening to Steely Dan’s “Aja.” On that disc, a guest artist named Tom Scott employs a “Lyricon,” a primitive synthesizer developed in the 1970s that could be played like a wind instrument.

Success. Beginning with the gratifying phrase, “If you do not get the results you want,” the dictionary offered me several alternative search strategies. None produced “Lyricon.”

Pop music, in fact, seems to be an OED weakness. On March 10, the online version added the proper noun “Deadhead” to denote a fan of the Grateful Dead – nearly 10 years after the band’s lead guitarist, Jerry Garcia, died.

Another thing: If you don’t know how to spell a word, I can’t see that the electronic dictionary offers much improvement over the old print approach. Maybe there is no way to address that, but how about a “did you mean” function for future editions of the CD-ROM? ‘

I plugged in “spoonge,” meaning “sponge,” and got the same blank stare OED gave me for Lyricon – when using the CD-ROM version, that is. The online edition, with its superior search architecture, did glean that it was “sponge” I was seeking.

Now that’s my definition of progress.