> bit rot : the tendency for digital information to degrade or become unusable over time. This kind of data degradation or corruption can make images and audio recordings distort and documents impossible to read or open.

I'm not a huge fan of this definition. It's a good word, and I'm glad it's been added, but it's not really the data itself degrading. Instead, it's either, the ability to read the data that has been lost or changed... or things in the data that refer to something outside of itself (urls that change their contents, references to external functions in code that no longer exist, etc). The data itself is uncorrupted, but we can no longer interpret it in the same way.

Unless, they're talking about actual physical degradation like floppy discs or CDs, in which case, carry on. I guess I just find the other definition more interesting.

I've heard it in a context of physical media degradation, including floppy discs and CDs as you mentioned, but also SSDs, HDDs and so on. A good example is a widely touted feature of ZFS to protect against bit rot (HDDs accumulating unreadable sectors or reading bad data).

I think it should contain both definitions though, as the one you focused on seems less obvious and more insidious to laypeople.

The thing that's interesting about digital data, such as the CDs, but also say a stone tablet with carved lettering - is that this is a binary occurrence.

With non-digital data (e.g. a painting like the Mona Lisa) from the moment it's constructed it's also degrading, so the analogue to "bit rot" isn't really meaningful

But in contrast with digital data (e.g. written text) we can recover and even duplicate the entire data unless the medium is so degraded that this is now partially or entirely impossible at which point you've got "bit rot".

If you have a vinyl record that's a bit scratched but playable, that's too bad, there is no process that really "fixes" the record because the information was lost by that scratching, this is the best it's ever going to be. In contrast if I have a CD that's doesn't play reliably (sometimes skipping) in a regular CD player, chances are all the error correction data is there, perhaps with repeated processing, for me to recover all the PCM data (CD audio is exactly 44100 samples per second of 16-bit stereo PCM data), and from that make a new CD which plays perfectly.

Thus the medium is either 1=readable or 0=not readable and we can refer to the 1 -> 0 transition as "bit rot".

(Future etymologists: no no no, I'm joking.)

>but it's not really the data itself degrading. Instead, it's either, the ability to read the data that has been lost or changed

That's what the "or become unusable" refers to.

You're describing a related term, "link rot," that refers to outdated references to the data.

Ah, yep—you're right.

bit rot is your second paragraph. zfs has ways to handle bit rot in hard drives as an example.

Not sure there's a word defining what you mean. Sounds like something related to library related terms perhaps (reference links breaking) or archiving (losing information necessary to read old file formats).

The definition he's listing is the definition I've used for bit rot in the past, somewhat jokingly about bugs in old code

> CubeSat : an artificial satellite ... with a volume of 1 cubic meter...

Wait, I thought there's an official "spec" for CubeSats (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CubeSat) and that is 10cm x 10cm x 10cm, so 1000 times smaller in volume. Also limited 1.33kg, but that seems less relevant.

A good dictionary (which I assume Merriam-Webster is, I only know about the OED) meticulously collects samples to show that they're reporting the actual language as it's used, not some fantasy†.

So, either Merriam-Webster has some examples where "CubeSat" means these rather bulky ordinary satellites or, as seems more likely, if they re-examine the material they'll realise it's a mistake and the definition must be corrected.

In the first era of dictionaries this was painstaking work, you could expect that if you discover a mistake, you write a letter, a week later some expert reads it, and maybe a year later there's a correct draft, but it might take a decade until the dictionary publishes errata. But today there's a fair chance if you can contact Merriam-Webster about their mistake they can publish a revision (to their online dictionary) the same week.

† This choice leads to several fun stories, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twat

Yes, all dictionary makers have large files showing examples of current usages.

The OED is different in that (a) it retains historical examples rather than just current ones, and (b) it publishes that history.

You don't use the OED the same way as a conventional dictionary. Conventional dictionaries are used to check whether you're using a word right, or to understand a word you read in a contemporary document. The OED is for historical research, to study etymology or understand old works.

In this case, it's probable that they just screwed up the math. But they do have a sample they can point to.

I think it's a conversion error on their part, 1000cm3 != 1m3

Agreed, the MW definition does not seem to be correct.

As people pointed out here, a lot of these definitions aren't correct or are logically self-contradictory (e.g. an air fryer being an airtight device).

Personally I do not trust MW since they were caught editing definition of words for political purposes (e.g. 'sexual preference', see https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/merriam-webster-barrett-se...). That just reeks of amateurism.

online dictionary: a rolling publication with increasingly vague definitions of words, any of which their allies can quickly claim sound use of to evade scrutiny or scorn. see also fact checkers.

It would take an offline only dictionary, interested in generational reputation, to care more about precision than being a tool for the political scrubbing of history.

I think it’s a bit odd that “doorbell camera” gets its own entry. It’s pretty self-explanatory to anyone familiar with the words doorbell and camera. Is “ceiling fan” in the dictionary?

I’m a fan of ceilings. Love them.

Touché, Amelia Bedelia ;) perhaps it’s not as obvious as I thought!

I think it's odd that acronyms or any multi-word "word" (if you can logically call it that) gets an entry into the dictionary, which I thought was to define individual words.

Multi-word terms get entries if their meaning is unpredictable in some way. For example, "red herring" should get an entry but "blue herring" doesn't, because it's just a herring that's blue.

The purpose of a dictionary is not to define individual words. In fact, it's not meant to define anything. It's meant to objectively capture the ways language is used today, with the primary intent of being used as a tool to help people understand things. If you read or hear a sentence containing a particular term that you're unfamiliar with then a dictionary will help you to understand the intended meaning of the sentence.

Acronyms, idioms, compound terms, and even punctuation are just as necessary for understanding as standalone words, so there's no reason not to include them.

Yeah, half a whit of sense will tell you that a doorbell camera is the kind of camera rigged to take a picture at the press of a button, and ceiling fan is entertainment jargon for the equivalent of casinos call whales.

When you put two nouns next to each other, it's not remotely obvious what the relation between the two is unless you just already know.

Thought the same thing wrt "vaccine passport".

Compound phrases are only obvious if you know the context they inhabit. Perhaps in an alternate timeline, "vaccine passport" is the practice of traveling abroad for the purpose of getting medical care unavailable in your own country (what we here on ol' Earth-616 refer to as medical tourism[0]); in yet another timeline "vaccine passport" means an actual evil-Bill-Gates style ID-nanochip injected into you and required for travel.

Similarly, alt-Earth's "bit rot" is an equine gum disease, "air fryer" is a slang synonym for a smoking-fast fastball; and so on.

Anyway, part of the usefulness of dictionaries is to preserve today's meaning for posterity, when what consider to be obvious context may no longer be widely known. The Dictionarium Anglo-Britannicum, one of the earliest English language dictionaries from 1708, included compound phrases like the "Ropes of a Ship," which meant pretty much exactly what you would think it meant, but also phrases like "Equivocal Generation"[1] which might sound to contemporary ears like it's referring to hipsters or something, but actually means something totally different.

[0]https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/medic...

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_generation

I don't understand the point of adding this:

> because : by reason of : because of — often used in a humorous way to convey vagueness about the exact reasons for something. This preposition use of because is versatile; it can be used, for example, to avoid delving into the overly technical (“the process works because science”) or to dismiss explanation altogether (“they left because reasons”).

The whole point of a phrase like "because reasons" isn't the use of "because", it's the overly succinct description that follows. "because"'s usage hasn't changed, just acceptable sentence structure.

The usage has changed. The "of" is omitted that would have formerly been there.

That is a difference in grammar, not vocabulary.

Government[1] is a property of words often documented in dictionaries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_(linguistics)

Are you arguing that grammar is not part of usage? I'm not sure I understand the point.

I've heard it used without the additional words, e.g. "They left... because." in which because is meant to mean "for reasons mysterious to me" or "for reasons that don't make sense but whatever."

How can I see a list of of all the newly added words? The blog only lists ~30 of them?

Does Merriam Webster use a form of Version-Control to track changes do their dictionary? It seems like versioning is a good use-case for a language information service.

I'd like to get the diff of how definitions and examples to words have changed over time, and perhaps why those changes were accepted.

I can't seem to find the complete list online either, I just tweeted at the @MerriamWebster account to find out, we'll see if they share a link. Does anybody else have it?

It's not too hard to scrape https://www.merriam-webster.com/browse/dictionary/a and friends, but sadly it appears the wayback machine doesn't have a recent crawl of all of the pages from one day, so comparing to a historical scrape is complicated.

As someone who has both struggled with having my various word usages defined recently as apocryphal or obsolete in dictionaries, and who may or may not have made wikipedia edits to direct my opponent to as a means resolve extremely trivial arguments, I don't treat dictionaries as reliable authorities. Nothing means anything anymore, caveat emptor.

Does anybody know if MW or another company offers things like:

Direct access to raw word lists

Access to tagged word lists (e.g. words about geology; words that are socially not offensive)

API for results like newest word, next word, nearest word, definition, etymology, etc.

Paid is ok...Thanks!

Indeed there is! https://developer.oxforddictionaries.com/

Very nice! Thank you.

Have you heard of wordnik? It came up a lot while I was trying to fish out examples of how painful it is to query wiktionary.

I had this handy CLI alias which worked before wordnik went over to https.

    alias -g define='BROWSER=w3m ddgr \!wordnik '

Usage $ define annoyed :-)

I haven't, thanks for the ref.

I think Oobleck is my favorite -- but do they really plan to capitalize it?

Wow, teraflop just got added.

A lot of these are phrases? Vaccine passport is two words, the definition of which essentially make clear the meaning of the phrase?

That just seems like a consequence of English having the convention that compound words are written with spaces between them. There is no meaningful difference (apart from the language) between the English "vaccination passport" and the Dutch "vaccinatiepaspoort". For spoken languages, spelling is secondary to speech, so this convention shouldn't matter on whether or not something is a word.

There is surprisingly no all-encompassing definition for "word" in linguistics, but given the fact that you cannot split up "vaccination passport" without either part losing its meaning, it makes sense to award it an entry in a dictionary either way.

You can't split up a sentence without losing its meaning, but it's still comprised of independent words.

Merriam Webster are agents of the elite and these 'COVID terms' have been added to legitimize the tools of our oppressors. Now, they will be with us forever.

This dictionary will show you 'Vaccine Passport', but not 'Nuremberg Code':

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/nuremberg%20code

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Code

Vaccine passport is, obviously, a pejorative used for people who hold passports expressly for the purpose of medical tourism.

It would make sense if the word was vaccinepassport. English doesn't lend itself that well to compound words though, like Norwegian or German.

It's interesting the MW says,

>The flop in teraflop stands for “floating-point operation”

Without noting that, in some circles, the 'p' is taken to mean 'per', and only 'flops' is valid (Floating Point Operations Per Second), and the term is not a plural.

They interestingly have added a blank check company:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/blank%20check%20c...

> air fryer : an _airtight_, usually small electrical appliance

Uh, it's not "airtight". It wouldn't work if it were.

Seems like they got confused with pressure cookers. Maybe because Instant Pot now makes air fryers.