Great words that aren’t (Excel edition)
English is an ever-evolving language, with most dictionaries welcoming 500–1,500 new words every year.
The job of a lexicographer is to compile dictionaries, adding and editing entries as they monitor what and how words are used in everyday life.
Lexicographers put their personal biases aside to look at a range of sources, from newspapers, magazines, books, TV, and radio to arguably the most influential ones nowadays: the web and social media.
Any new word must have sustained widespread usage to crawl into a dictionary. And the same applies to ones that have picked up new definitions.
On a few occasions, I’ve found myself crafting the odd word on the spot that I feel would work perfectly in my writing to add a bit of variation, only for my spell checker to be a killjoy and flag it as invalid.
I was thinking, what Excel and data-related words do you wish were formally recognised by mainstream sources like the Oxford, Cambridge, and Collins dictionaries
Here’s mine…
‘ascendingly’ and ‘descendingly’
After sorting a table column in Excel, what do you say?
I sorted the data in ascending order.
I sorted the data in descending order.
It’s common to add ‘ly’ onto the end of an adjective to form an adverb (e.g. quick → quickly, happy → happily, sad → sadly).
You can’t do that with ‘ascending’ and ‘descending’, though. At least you’re not supposed to…
I sorted the data in ascending order.
Why aren’t these already recognised adverb formations?
‘tablise’
My definition of ‘tablise’ (pronounced ‘table-ize’) refers to converting unattached data into table-based data in Excel — either by moving it into an existing table or directly generating a new one from it.
‘Tabulate’ doesn’t distinguish between these. You could dump a load of data into a worksheet, draw a few borders, and colour a few cells, but it still wouldn’t be tablised data — it would only be tabulated.
Put the data into a table → Tablise the data.
I put the data into a table → I tablised the data.
You never know — be the pioneer of a new word and it might just proliferate in usage one day. 😄
