How fast can a word enter the language?

A couple of weeks ago, an apparently totally made-up new word seemed to set the land-speed record for the jump from “early use” to “inclusion in a dictionary.” On May 12, the word malamanteau showed up in the Web comic xkcd, where it was defined as “a neologism for a portmanteau created by incorrectly combining a malapropism with a neologism.”

It’s not the clearest definition ever written, but the idea is that a malamanteau blends one or more not-quite-right words to create a completely new one. Examples include the classic misunderestimated, bewilderness (as in “lost in the bewilderness”), and insinuendos (innuendo + insinuation).

The comic in which it appeared — self-described as a “webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language,” and beloved by Web geeks — showed the word malamanteau as the subject of a Wikipedia page, with the caption: “Ever notice how Wikipedia has a few words it really likes?”

And just like that, we were off. In a sterling example of life imitating art, a Wikipedia page for malamanteau was speedily created — and just as rapidly deleted for “not being a real word,” but not before generating thousands of words of discussion as to its “realness,” “notability,” and general usefulness or lack thereof.

I’m a regular reader of xkcd (even its name appeals to wordy people — it was deliberately chosen by the author, Randall Munroe, to be an unpronounceable and meaningless four-letter word). So when I saw malamanteau show up in the comic strip, the very first thing I did was head to Wordnik, the collaborative online dictionary that I run. I wasn’t disappointed: By the time I got there, the word already had its own entry, complete with reference to its appearance in xkcd and examples of malamanteaux (the preferred plural). The word quickly made it to the Urban Dictionary, too, although the first meaning there, where users vote on their favorite meanings of words, is slightly different. There, it’s “a word defined to infuriate Wikipedia editors.” Time from the word’s debut in a comic strip to appearance in a dictionary: less than half a day.

True, for many English speakers, use in a Web comic and inclusion in a couple of online dictionaries are not enough to establish malamanteau as a “real” word. But whether you consider malamanteau to be a real word or an elaborate joke, it is a classic example of the kind of word that people argue about when they argue about what makes a word real.