“City room” — Oxford English Dictionary Submission (Part 1 - Vision)
~1,400 words, a seven-minute read
Two excerpts to kick this off:
Many correspondents seem to regard getting a word into ‘the dictionary’ as a sure route to fame and even fortune. They are often disappointed to hear that the process of adding any new word, or a new sense of an existing word, is long and painstaking, and depends on the accumulation of a large body of published (preferably printed) citations showing the word in actual use over a period of at least ten years. Once a word is added to the OED it is never removed; OED provides a permanent record of its place in the language.
— Oxford English Dictionary “Help” page
Actually, why not screw appearances and just state the obvious: No really serious writer should be without an OED, whether it’s brought or stolen or hacked into the online version of or whatever you need to do. Nothing else comes close.
— David Foster Wallace (DFW) in “Twenty-Four Word Notes”
So, about 24 hours ago, I went ahead and Googled for the first time “how to get a word into the Oxford English Dictionary”. Veteran readers of this Substack will know I expressed interest in officially establishing the term “city room” in the English language. My reason for sharing the quotes above are to make it crystal clear why OED is my dictionary of choice. Simply, it’s exclusively the OED that “is widely regarded as the accepted authority on the English language.”
For some brief background on my ambition, what I wrote a few posts ago was this:
There is a dictionary definition of city room. It may not be what you expect. Nor is it what I am writing about. Here’s Webster’s: “city room (noun): the department where local news is handled in a newspaper editorial office”
For its part, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) does not list the term at all. It does have a word for what Webster’s dictionary described, but it’s “city desk: the department in a city newspaper office which deals with local news”. Regardless, the city room that I am/have discussed is not officially part of the English lexicon.
One goal I have is to formalize this other meaning of the term: the one that refers to the type of urban space that I am investigating here in Singapore. As I explain below, Singapore is an epicenter of sorts for the concept. If nothing else emerges from this little adventure abroad, the increased popularization of the “city room” seems like a noble pursuit. I’m trying to do it without hammering the term with hashtags, too.
I actually did not premeditate that idea. It was one of those cases of, “I don’t know what I think until I write it” things. Or at least, I didn’t premeditate the ambition to submit the term to the dictionary. It came out, somehow, from somewhere (thanks, Substack!). After reflecting on the piece, I thought it was a neat idea. At the same time, I wasn’t entirely sure it could be a practical goal. And I do have other ambitions in life, in case you are wondering.
But, and I don’t know if you know this, because I did not know it until I searched for it. It’s actually pretty straightforward to pitch a term for inclusion in the OED. Here’s what the submission form looks like:
As you can probably tell by now, prior to yesterday I frankly barely considered what was involved with something like this. I suppose a primitive notion flashed through my mind, something like a sort of Harry Potter-esque tribunal composed of illuminati who meet once every 200 full moons in some mysterious, candlelit library in rural Buckinghamshire.*
Nope, it’s just an online one-pager. Although I guess that technically doesn’t rule out the illuminati candle meeting. But words are now added to OED four times a year (once every three full moons). Check it out.
So obviously I’m going to try and do this.
Will they accept it? I have no idea. Will this little adventure lead to good Substack material no matter the outcome? You bet. But that’s not the only reason I’m doing it, right? Right (it’s a good goal with or without Substack). Is this week’s post of the sort that you expect from someone who is vying for a venerable 0.00016% of English language real estate? Don’t answer that.
*If you are with OED, know that I deeply deeply mean this as a serious compliment.
But last week you said you didn’t even have access to the OED!
After some miscommunication with a few librarians, I’m proud to say that thanks to my current position as visiting scholar at the National University of Singapore, I have full complimentary access to the online OED! Which is the best one, since it’s always up-to-date. And let me say, if you are into words, it’s like being in a candy store, this access. While writing this, I had to resist numerous urges to pull a DFW-style blast of peculiar words that would seriously impress during Scrabble. If this paragraph excites you, subscribe to the OED word of the day like I did. But I digress.
The first step to submitting a term to the OED is to make sure the word isn’t already there. So let’s see:
So it’s not there yet, but of course curiosity naturally leads to wondering about the (2) “full text” and “quotation” entries. Both go to the same thing, which is this:
Remember the other “city room” definition I noted earlier from the other (inferior) dictionary-which-will-not-be-named? Both of those entries are referring to that one, the first one making it clear that it’s a “newspaper’s” city room, and the second one is from a book called The Clarion, which (I learned from an Amazon review) is partly about the newspaper business.
So, the opportunity remains open for the urban-space-type version of the definition. With that in mind, I can’t resist sharing the current OED terms that would straddle “city room”:
city republic n. a city-state constituted as a republic.
And:
city shorts n. smart, tailored shorts suitable for wearing to work, typically regarded as womenswear.
And since I actually really can’t help it I have to share another one (incidentally, my browser spell checker says this one is misspelled — the downside of the paywalled and somewhat inaccessible OED database, I suppose):
cityship n. (a) the state, condition, or status of being a city; (b) a city-state (rare).
And that’s just three of 89 compound nouns in the OED that use the word “city”. 89!!
Ok, that was great. Now at this point, this post could get very long (like the last city room one) or I could wrap it up. Today I filled my notebook with something of a “who, what, when, why” that goes for a while about this, but for now I’ll go with the latter and close out.
Three final bits:
First, my current draft definition of the compound noun: “city room”. This surely needs some tweaking before the final submission, but it’s a starting point:
“A large, architecturally enclosed space in an urban setting that supports a multitude of public-facing functions that may be civic or commercial in nature.”
Request for feedback: Dear readers, you probably know I’m always open to constructive comments, but in this case I’m especially receptive to thoughts you might have before I submit this. Of course, if you have any experience attempting to get words in dictionaries, I would love to hear about that too. The comments section is always open, or if you prefer you can write to me privately by replying to this email.
And finally, below the line is my best attempt at an exhaustive list of scholarly and journalistic works (by people who are not me) that reference the term “city room”. This will be included in the submission and I’ll use it as evidence that the term has been used since at least 1970. I may also contact some of the authors to hear their take. After all, if this is successful, 99% of it would be attributable to their work.
Also, I’m linking three notable uses of the term from commercial websites. Note the capital “C” and “R”, letters that most scholars never capitalized.
There is probably something to be said about the importance of establishing an objective (i.e. OED) and lower-case definition of “city room” in contrast to the property-developer-driven tendency to capitalize it, but that’s another topic for another time.
In the meantime, I’ll probably keep using this Substack to share updates on this. That is of course if any updates are to be.
We will see!
Note: this list may be updated without tracked changes if more sources are discovered
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