A Word, Please: Note to Tyra Banks — dictionaries don’t work that way

Attention denizens of the English-speaking world: Supermodel and television personality Tyra Banks would like a word.

That word: smize. Where she would like it: Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary.

Smize, a Tyra Banks original coinage, means to smile with one’s eyes. And it’s gained some traction, securing spots in several online dictionaries.

Merriam’s, however, remains a holdout. But Banks and her people aren’t relenting.

“We call them. We email them. We show them the cover of the Wall Street Journal,” Banks recently told National Public Radio.

“We show everything, all this stuff. And they’re just like ... ‘We’ve had our eye on smize for a couple of years.’ And I’m like, ‘You know what? Now you’re just hating.’”

And with that, Banks makes her second-most important contribution to the language, redefining “hating” to mean “practicing lexicography.”

Lexicography, the act of creating dictionaries, doesn’t work like the maître d’ at a fancy restaurant. Important people can’t strong-arm or cajole or smize their way to the front of the line. The process for adding new words to the language is far more democratic than that.

English speakers start using a new word, like “deepfake,” or they start using an old word for a new meaning, like “web.” Then lexicographers begin compiling a database of places and ways and times the word is used.

Then, when it’s clear that you and I have officially welcomed the word into our English language, lexicographers formalize our new word or definition by putting it in a dictionary.

More simply stated: We vote. Lexicographers tally our votes. No amount of lobbying dictionary editors should change that process.

“There’s really no way that anyone can influence whether a word is entered in the dictionary except by using it,” Merriam Webster lexicographer Peter Sokolowski told me in a Twitter direct message. “If it catches on and others also use it the same way, then it’s likely to find its way in.”

Normally it takes a long time for a neologism — a newly coined word — to make its way into the dictionary because it takes a long time to be sure English speakers really have adopted the new word for the long haul. “Blog,” for example, took six years to show up in Merriam-Webster’s from the time its editors started tracking it.

Neologisms from the worlds of technology and science sometimes get into dictionaries faster simply because of how quickly technology and science can influence our world and our language.

In 1984, for example, a word that was then just 2 years old made it into Merriam-Webster’s when “AIDS” may have set a record for the shortest-ever time from coinage to dictionary.

That record has since been smashed by another new word, “COVID-19,” which arrived in Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary just two months after scientists created this mash-up of “coronavirus disease 2019.”

“Every word has its own pace,” Sokolowski told me. “But the words that were new to this pandemic were entered quickly because of such widespread use.”

New words get their start any number of ways. “Smize” is a common type of neologism called a “portmanteau” — a smashing together of two existing words, like “brunch” from “breakfast” and “lunch.” Interestingly, lexicographers tend to eschew the fancy-sounding “portmanteau” for the simpler term “blend.”

And that’s despite the fact that “portmanteau” had an advocate more famous and influential than any supermodel: Humpty Dumpty introduced the word to generations of children when he used it in Lewis Carroll’s 1871 “Through the Looking Glass.”

If Banks believes she has more influence over the language than the world’s most famous egg, then I, too, would like to get in on this let’s-try-to-boss-around-the-lexicographers game.

I hereby demand that dictionaries add the word Tyrarize, meaning to demand that a word be added to the dictionary. Obviously, the demand itself counts as an act of Tyrarism. So I guess that makes me a Tyrarist.

June Casagrande is the author of “The Joy of Syntax: A Simple Guide to All the Grammar You Know You Should Know.” She can be reached at [email protected].

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