I have seen the word “linguaphile” (meaning word lover or language lover) on Dictionary.com and the Free Dictionary, but it’s not there in the Oxford English Dictionary. It no longer tries to be comprehensive. “The language is expanding so fast this may be an impossible mission,” said Edmund Weiner, deputy chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary.
Mark Abley recalls their conversation in his book, The Prodigal Tongue: Dispatches from the Future of English, where he also writes about Singlish and other variants of the English language, as I mentioned here.
“The Internet poses problems,” said Weiner. “We tend to avoid citing the Web unless we feel we really have to. What we’ve tended to cite are newsgroups and discussion groups – they guarantee to archive them for a long time. We’ve occasionally taken quotations from websites. But we don’t like doing that.”
