Why isn’t the Wordle word in the dictionary?

Yesterday, I had a rare fail on Wordle … and it seems so did a lot of other people judging by the uproar on Twitter. 

Interestingly, I was slightly less indignant than most as the correct answer, parer, seemed like a perfectly reasonable word to me. In fact, and you’ll just have to believe me on this, it was one I’d thought of trying. It’s a tool you use to pare fruit, vegetables, or cheese, usually a small knife or a peeler. What surprised me more was that it doesn’t appear as an entry in any of the major online dictionaries – if you type it in, you either get nothing or redirected to the entry for the verb, pare. I also notice as I type this post, my spellcheck is underlining it as an unrecognized word too.

Intrigued, and slightly doubting my own intuitions, my next port of call was a corpus search. It turns out it isn’t exceptionally common, and it’s difficult to get exact stats because of noise (names, foreign words, etc.), but there are certainly plenty of examples of usage out there, mostly in recipes and adverts for knife sets.

So why isn’t the word in any of the dictionaries? How did we miss it? Dictionary editors do regularly check for new words to add to a dictionary, especially when they’re compiling new editions. It isn’t an exact science though. New coinages and buzzwords jump out and get noted down. Sometimes words get noticed and noted by lexicographers when they’re working on an entry for another word. Several online dictionaries also have facilities for users to add suggested new words. Old, but relatively rare words though are easily missed.

But has parer actually been missed?

Learner’s dictionaries, of course, focus on the more high-frequency words that are likely to be most useful to learners of the language, so parer would be unlikely to feature anyway. And the free online versions of general reference dictionaries aren’t always based on the most comprehensive version of that publisher’s dictionaries. So, you won’t, for example, find the full OED available for free online, it’s a subscription service. Although, in fact, you don’t even have to go to the full OED to find parer. The entry below, in which parer appears at least as a run-on if not a headword, is from the Oxford Dictionary of English, a slightly less weighty, single-volume dictionary. Similarly, I found it in an old print version of The American Heritage College Dictionary I have on my shelves.

 

Oxford Dictionary of English, 3e

So, I went back to online sources and found that if you scroll down to the second entry for pare on dictionary.com, which has recently taken on data from Oxford Dictionaries, you do find it hidden away there too. 

So, before you exclaim that a word isn’t in the dictionary, perhaps you need to consider which dictionary you’re looking in and how much you can reasonably expect to get for free online.