How to be a word hunter

Must-have weapons to be word hunter:

Google alert: In looking through the terms gathered for my blog since 2009, I noticed that journalists, twitterers, and bloggers are foreseeable. They have a tendency to flag words that are new to their vocabulary with such phrases as “known as” or “as they call it” or “known to fans as” or even “new word” and of course, “neologism”.  The trick is, don't put only “neologism” on Google alert but also “known as”, “coined the word” etc.

Twitter: I definitely love it, Twitter is my best source of information. In my opinion it is a newswire other than a social platform. Follow the social spotlights on Twitter and new words will pop-up! See #Frankenstorm Sandy coverage, for example.

Tip: to improve your search you can use the real-time social media search nad visual discovery tools such as SeeSaw, and Jugnoo (thank you @ermebelinda). 

Serendipitous surfing and reading: I have to admit that very often I jump into a new word by accident. I’m just reading a news and voila’, a new word is smiling at me! Love comes when you don't expect it..

By the way, consider that:

1) Most words are new to most people most of the time. There are plenty of people who are culturally left behind, for some of them the word “blog” is a novelty (coined in 1999). 

2) Websites are ephemeral. A special skill for word-hunting is looking for immediacy. Not only can new or newly popular terms be identified very soon after they bubble to the surface, but they should be captured before websites archive their online content.

Be careful:

Do not look  to hunt  the word, or to tame it, or capture it for inclusion in some kind of lexical zoo. Take instead, a snapshop of the word  - as I do in my blog - that shows the word in its natural environment.

Happy hunting!

Sources

Official Dictionary of Unofficial English, Grant Barrett
Word Spy, Paul McFedries