"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 04/12/17 (phubbing)

I thought I'd talk over the next couple of days about the troubles that lexicographers sometimes get themselves in. One of the most common questions that you get asked if you work in dictionaries is, "How do I get my new word into the dictionary? You know, can I get it in? Here it is. It's brilliant." And the answer is always no. Of cource, if a word is used often enoughover a certain period of time, then it stands a good chance of going into the dictionary, but not until then, so we don't listen to petitions. But it turns out, if it's an inside job, you might get a word in. In 2013, a movement sprang up in Australia that carried the slogan, "Stop phubbing". Phabbing was a blend of phone snubbing, in other words, you are snubbing someone by just looking at your screen. The word just took off, literally. And it was only probably a couple of months later, after the advertising agency had really propelled this into the language, that Macquarie Dictionaries owned up and said it was all part of a dictionary campaign to update your dictionary and it was a completely made-up word by a group of linguists in an office somewhere and they had done what we always say is impossible. But eventually we all had to eat our words because if you look in the Oxford Dictionary here online, you will find that phubbing is in and it's one of the very, very few examples of a word that has been artificially created and has succesfully gone into the dictionary.