lexicographer's dilemma: when to include slang

Every dictionary begins with a quiet argument. A lexicographer sits with a stack of citations, a coffee going cold, and wrestles with a question that has no clean answer: should this word be in the book, or should it be left to die in the playground? The question sharpens whenever informal speech turns up in a newspaper column, a song lyric, or a post from a teenager in suburban Sydney. Slang is the most contested of all dictionary territory.

Dictionaries have always been cultural mirrors, but the reflection they offer is shaped by the moment of polishing. A prescriptive dictionary holds the line: only forms that have earned the dignity of print and at least three generations of polite use gain a place between its covers. A descriptive dictionary swings the other way, treating the living tongue as the only true authority. The tension between these poles is where most lexicographic headaches live.

Australia offers a particularly rich laboratory for this debate. The Macquarie Dictionary, often called the national dictionary, has spent decades absorbing colourful local coinages such as "arvo," "barbie," and "bottle-o" alongside formal registers. In Melbourne's café strips and in the laneways behind Sydney's Central Station, multicultural communities keep reshaping what counts as everyday Australian English, blending Vietnamese, Greek, Arabic, Mandarin, and Indigenous languages into new patterns of speech. Lexicographers watching the changes from Brisbane to Perth know that the next edition's margin notes will need to be generous.

For those who work on smaller languages, the question cuts deeper. A language like Setswana, spoken by millions across southern Africa, has fewer institutional shields against loss. When its speakers also live beside dominant global tongues, the informal registers can disappear within a generation. The dilemma of when to record slang therefore becomes a question of cultural memory, not merely of editorial fashion.

The cultural weight of informal vocabulary

Slang does heavy cultural work that standard vocabulary does not. It marks group membership, signals playfulness, and offers a soft rebellion against authority. Walk through a schoolyard in Adelaide and the latest teenage slang tells you who is inside a friendship circle and who is not. Sit in a pub in Fremantle and the order — "schooner of Cascade, thanks cobber" — signals age, region, and social comfort in a single sentence. Recording these patterns means recording identity itself.

Yet the same cultural energy that makes slang worth saving also makes it volatile. A word that thrives in the eastern suburbs of Sydney may have no purchase in Hobart, and an expression that rides high in one music scene may be forgotten by the next festival. The challenge is to capture a snapshot without mistaking the snapshot for the portrait. The editorial brief given to the team behind writing a bilingual dictionary for Setswana and English treated slang as a category worth documenting because it captures speakers as they actually talk.

This is the same logic that pushed nineteenth-century dictionaries of Australian English to record bush expressions, convict argot, and Aboriginal loanwords. Words such as "kangaroo," "boomerang," and "wombat" entered standard dictionaries because the speakers of the new nation used them constantly. A language without its slang is a language stripped of its laughter and its rough edges.

Defining the boundary between standard and street

The boundary between standard vocabulary and informal vocabulary is not a wall but a gradient. Working lexicographers usually apply a small set of tests before adding a slang term to the main text. They ask whether the form appears in edited prose beyond a single author, whether it has crossed regional boundaries, and whether it has survived at least a brief stretch of years. They also weigh the source material carefully.

These tests look clinical, but they are full of judgement. A term such as "selfie" satisfied every criterion within months, while other terms linger in the dictionary's limbo for decades. The same is true of words like "unco," a Scottish and Australian term that has hovered at the edges of dictionaries for a century without quite settling in. Lexicographers often speak of a "citation bank," a continually updated archive of recorded uses that supports or undermines a candidate word.

The boundary also depends on the dictionary's stated audience. A volume aimed at schoolchildren will include slang with explanatory glosses and usage notes, while an academic dictionary of historical English may treat the same form as a passing curiosity. The choice is rarely binary; it is calibrated, and it changes with each new edition.

Australian case studies in lexicographic choices

Australia's dictionary tradition offers vivid examples of these choices. The Australian National Dictionary, first published in 1988 and continually updated, set out to record words and meanings that had their strongest claim on Australian soil. "Bushwalking," "battler," and "smoko" earned full entries, each supported by dated citations reaching back into the colonial press. The editors drew a careful line between casual slang that signalled regional loyalty and casual slang that looked destined to evaporate within a season.

Indigenous words have shaped Australian English in ways that complicate the usual debates. Borrowings such as "kangaroo" and "billabong" are no longer slang at all but standard terms, and they arrived in the dictionary through sustained cultural exchange. By contrast, contemporary Indigenous slang — terms used within communities rather than picked up by the wider press — often goes unrecorded, partly because lexicographers lack the trust and access required to document it responsibly.

Similar lessons apply elsewhere. In southern Africa, a short piece titled Do you know that the names Tshosa and Tshane are types of spears shows how borrowed names can drift between proper nouns, family names, and everyday vocabulary. A dictionary that ignored such drift would surrender a layer of cultural meaning.

Approach	Prescriptive dictionary	Descriptive dictionary
Treatment of slang	Excluded or labelled nonstandard	Included with usage notes
Source of evidence	Edited prose, literary texts	Wide range including speech and social media
Regional forms	Often restricted to the dominant variety	Multiple regional forms accepted
Editorial pace	Slower, more conservative	More responsive to recent coinages
Main risk	Excludes the living language	May include short-lived fads
Main reward	Stable reference for formal users	Richer record of how people actually speak

Methodology: how entries get approved

Behind every dictionary entry is a long paper trail. The first task is to find the word in writing, ideally across several decades and several regions. Australian lexicographers scan newspapers from Perth, Adelaide, and Brisbane, listen to archived broadcasts, and consult databases of literature and song lyrics. Each citation must be verifiable, with the date, source, and surrounding context preserved.

The second task is to weigh the word's reach. Does the form appear in formal writing, or only in casual chat? Has it been used by speakers who did not know each other, in regions far apart? Has it acquired stable meanings, or does it shift every time it surfaces? These questions are answered through repeated reading, slow comparison, and sometimes a meeting where the editorial committee argues politely for an hour over a single line.

The story of individual words often shows how this method works. The word "morse," used in Setswana contexts in ways that have nothing to do with the English verb or the code, is documented in the story behind the word morse in Setswana, where the citation trail reveals how a borrowed form can take on a life of its own.

Preservation through inclusion: the Setswana parallel

For smaller languages, the case for recording slang is also a case for cultural survival. Setswana has a rich informal vocabulary that lives in markets, shebeens, taxi ranks, and the songs of kibaara musicians. Much of this vocabulary never reaches print, partly because formal publishing channels still favour standard registers. When the older speakers who use these forms pass away, the words can vanish within a single generation.

A dictionary that captures even a fraction of this informal layer becomes an archive as well as a reference. It preserves meanings along with the attitudes and rhythms that give a language its particular warmth. For Setswana speakers in Botswana, South Africa, and the diaspora, a dictionary that respects their everyday speech is a small but real act of recognition. The same is true for Australian communities whose voices have historically been underrepresented in print.

Lexicographers therefore approach slang with a posture that is part scholarly, part custodial. They record carefully, label carefully, and explain carefully. They accept that some of their choices will look outdated in twenty years, and they build their dictionaries so that future editors can revise them. The work is slow, often invisible, and occasionally maddening, but it is one of the quiet ways that cultures keep hold of themselves.

A useful next step for any reader curious about how these decisions play out in practice is to read the published case study on Setswana place names, which traces how a single borrowed word moves from everyday speech into the dictionary's main text.