‘Latinx’ makes the cut as Merriam-Webster adds over 800 words to the dictionary
By Thomas Devlin
In the never-ending quest to capture the English language, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary regularly adds new words. As lexicographer Kory Stamper explains in her book Word by Word, this is an exhaustive progress. A team of editors has to comb through text to find words that are being used regularly and consistently. They try to avoid “fad” words that are unlikely to last more than a few weeks, and they have to accurately represent English as it is spoken all across the United States. As a result of those efforts, Merriam-Webster announced on September 4 the addition of over 800 new words to its dictionary.
The sources of these new words are diverse. There are words taken from other languages, like the Korean chili paste gochujang and the French restaurant term mise en place. Then there are the tech terms, like Instagramming and force quit. And of course you can’t forget millennial words that are “ruining language” like guac (short for guacamole) and hangry (when you’re both hungry and angry).
One word that is particularly interesting doesn’t come from any of those sources, though: Latinx. This is the gender-neutral version of Latino and Latina, created by activists who want to get rid of the gendered nature of the Spanish terms. It’s an example of verbal hygiene, which is a linguistic term that refers to conscious efforts to change language.
Latinx has gained a lot of momentum in the past few years, but has been around since about 2004. Last year, Babbel Magazine wrote about the rise of the term, and why people are for or against it. Deanalís Resto, who is Puerto Rican, believed the use of the word was important to break down the hierarchy in which the male Latino is the norm:
“A lot of people will be like ‘Oh, it’s just semantics, it’s just a word,’ but words are powerful. It’s awesome to feel like you’re a part of something bigger, even with one word. It feels really powerful.”
The appearance of Latinx in an English dictionary is also notable because its roots, Latino and Latina, are not based in English. The English language doesn’t even have the same kind of grammatical gender, lacking markers such as -o and -a that would make nouns masculine or feminine. Still, the fight over the word is largely happening here in the United States because Latinx identities here have been engaging with gender issues for a while.
There is plenty of backlash to Latinx, which happens whenever there’s any kind of language change. First, there are those who think any attempts at gender neutrality is liberal political correctness. Then there are Spanish speakers who think Latinx is an English construction that is being imposed on them by people who don’t even speak Spanish (some prefer Latine because it could conceivably be pronounced in Spanish). And then there are people who argue Latino and Latina are bad in the first place because it’s a homogenous term that colonizers forced on disparate groups of people who don’t necessarily belong under the same umbrella. Still, Latinx has gained a lot of ground and, as its addition to the dictionary reflects, it is being regularly used by a large number of people.
It should be noted that Latinx being in the dictionary is not a political statement. Dictionary writers are trying to accurately reflect the words that are being used widely by Americans, not what words people should be using (see: descriptivism). For those in favor of the word, however, its addition to Merriam-Webster is a happy event.
