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Domainers get there before the dictionary

Kevin Murphy, August 19, 2010, 13:08:05 (UTC), Domain Sales

The new third edition of the Oxford Dictionary of English contains more than 2,000 new words, according to reports today, but it looks like domainers will find slim pickings.
For every neologism the dictionary now defines, you’ll find a .com equivalent that was registered years ago, in some cases over a decade ago.
Here are some newly official generic dictionary words, along with the earliest date I could find for their original .com registration.

SoftSkills – May 1996
Turducken – June 1997
ExitStrategy – August 1998
ChillPill – December 1999
CarbonCapture – May 2000
Cheeseball – August 2000
Vuvuzela – May 2004
PayWall – June 2004
Frenemy – February 2005
Defriend – June 2005
Staycation – November 2005
Bromance– April 2006
Microblogging – April 2007
Deleveraging – April 2007
TweetUp – June 2007
Overleveraged – July 2007
ToxicDebt – September 2007
QuantitativeEasing – November 2008
Catastrophizing – April 2009

Not all of these were registered by domainers, of course. Some are in use, though plenty are currently parked or marked for sale.
The Oxford dictionaries cover primarily UK English. Some of these words, like “cheeseball” or “turducken” are Americanisms that clearly saw some lag crossing the Atlantic.

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Comments (1)

  1. The evolution of language is a beautiful thing. 🙂

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