Recently, part of my day involves doing a technical review of a book about web mashups and I’m doing it with a basically virgin install of Open Office. What I found interesting about that process today is that many of the words used in the book aren’t considered words—at least, they’re not in Open Office’s standard dictionary (or Firefox’s). I had to add them to the spelling dictionary. Some of these are in published dictionaries and some aren’t. Does anyone know how long it typically take for “new” words like these to become commonly accepted in a language?

blog
blogger
blogging
weblog
wiki
mashup
username
google (I know, it’s a pronounproper noun—or is it? Have you googled anything lately?)
trackback
plugin
aggregator (aggregate [verb] is common but aggregator [noun] is not)
app (slang, but very common)

Filed under Technology, Writing and tagged books, dictionary, mashups, open office, words.