Four times a year, the venerable Oxford English Dictionary releases a list of words it has added, revised, or otherwise updated. Given that the OED contains nearly 300,000 entries, releasing a new edition that thoroughly updates is a monumental task. (The latest fully updated edition was only the second, and was released in 1989.) So, in this online world, the editors have taken a different tack: “Published quarterly since 2000, the updates make up the Third Edition of the OED.” In other words, the OED, like language, is constantly evolving. (The full online version is available through many universities and libraries; if you want your own subscription, be prepared to pay about $300 a year.)
The December updates mostly involve additions of words with prefixes, like “unmacho” (adjective) and “unmasculine” (verb), and some of what Bryan A. Garner might call “needless variants,” like “unpartisan” (what’s wrong with “nonpartisan”?) and “unpenetrative” (an adjective very similar to “impenetrative”).
Most of these additions are not “new” words, in the sense that people are just starting to use them. “Unpenetrative,” for example, was first recorded in 1795, the OED says, but shows a large uptick in this century. That led to this definition: “Not penetrative. Later chiefly (Sport): not capable of breaching an opponent’s defence.”
The updates are divided into “new entries,” “new subentries,” and “new senses.” In the December list are only two “new senses,” for the verbs “fight” and “hope.” They’re not senses in their own right, but senses as parts of phrases.
For “fight,” that comes in the form of the expression “to fight the good fight.” The OED lists two “senses” of that phrase. The first, “to fight the good fight of faith,” is of course a religious reference, which the OED calls “originally and chiefly Christian” and traces to a 1534 edition of the Bible. It implies fighting especially “in the face of opposition of persecution.”
The second sense implies faith not in a religious sense, but a moral one: “To campaign or struggle valiantly for a just cause; to defend what one believes to be right.” The OED traces that usage to Coleridge in 1809, though let’s not forget Don Quixote’s quest to “fight the unbeatable foe,” in the musical version, at least.
Someone who “fights the good fight” also “hopes for the best,” the “new sense” entry of “hope” in the December update. The OED says that phrase goes all the way back to 1425. Another variant is “to hope for the best and prepare for the worst,” which traces to 1565.
So what took the OED so long to get these into the dictionary? Hey now–there are a lot of words out there, and infinite combinations, so cut the editors some slack. Remember, too, that the dictionary is a guidebook to the way we use language, not a rule book on how we must use it. The editors, it seems, must “fight the good fight” to keep it as up-to-date as possible, but in the end, must “hope for the best” possible outcome.
Merrill Perlman managed copy desks across the newsroom at the New York Times, where she worked for twenty-five years. Follow her on Twitter at @meperl.