After years of struggle and recrimination, the long lexicographic battle is finally over: Esports, and not e-sports, has been added to the dictionary. The word, describing "competitive tournaments of video games, especially among professional gamers," was added to the lexicon at Dictionary.com earlier this week.
The site explained that its process of selecting new words is based on reviews of external sources, as well as input from its users, through both direction suggestions and search data. But not every candidate makes the cut.
"We rely on research in traditional publications, as well as technology like corpus research. In our case, we are currently using a corpus that has over 19 billion words," it wrote. "The corpus contains a massive collection of sources, from literature to news articles to television and interview transcripts, balanced to reflect actual usage of language."
Other game-related terms joining the new word parade are "permadeath" (the permanent death of a defeated character, after which the player of the game cannot continue with the same character) and "completionist" (a player who attempts to complete every challenge and earn every achievement or trophy in a video game). But clearly, "esports" is the important addition this time around; sorry, hyphenators, but it's "game over" for you! (That one's not actually in the dictionary yet, but I'm hopeful for 2016.)
