Hi everybody Cheryl Ackison here. Welcome to another edition of Full Measure after hours.

What is a woman? Today an expert in word mapping explains how activists are

successfully lobbying dictionaries to change the meanings of our words in real time.

The definition of a woman, changing illegal immigrant to illegal migrant, everybody's saying it now.

Redefining words, changing our language in real time.

Activists have figured out how to lobby dictionaries

to change the way we talk and the way we think.

Today we hear from Kelly Wright, an experimental sociolinguist and lexicographer working

at Virginia Tech University. Can you define those terms of what you are an external sociolinguist and like

psychographer?

Yeah, absolutely. So sociolinguistics is the it's the science of speech

but what we focus on is how language is used in the world so that's the socio part.

It's a theoretical discipline but I am an experimentalist so I take

those theories and try to apply them in the lab to see how they work in real time.

Like theography is the practice of working on a dictionary so I'm essentially

a word-mapper I look at how words change over time and put them into an official space.

What can you tell us about how dictionary terms are defined today?

Well, it's an interesting process. They're perhaps different for each dictionary.

Most of them look at who looks up what. So for an example

when dictionary.com chooses their word of beer they do it based on searches. So a lot of things that are perhaps not in the dictionary

that get added to the dictionary in the modern world are done by here's what people are interested

in looking up,

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