When the question “Is xyz really a word?” comes up – whether in casual conversation, in reading an article in the newspaper, or in playing Scrabble – people will often look to the dictionary for an answer. Which dictionary, of course, depends on what’s lying around the house or the office, or these days, what’s available on-line. But is this the right way to answer our question? As morphologists, we need to think about how dictionaries come to be, and how much we credit them with the authority to decide what’s a word.

There’s a lot to be said about how dictionaries have evolved and how they are produced today . for our immediate purposes, we can identify a number of reasons why we wouldn’t always want to base the answer to our question on what we find (or don’t) in a dictionary. Here are a few such reasons.