I stumbled on an old blog post on Englastuces titled googling the word "generic.” Obviously we all know and use the term googling and google as a verb. “Go google it!” Well the term “googling” was placed in dictionaries in July 2006—less than a year ago if you can do the math.
Googling: to use the Google search engine to obtain information about (as a person) on the World Wide Web
It’s just one of those commonly used terms that you don’t really think about it being added to a dictionary, nor does it even matter to most if it is or not. Clearly this has been a word for much longer than its dictionary life, but all words have to originate from somewhere. Which seeing the birth of a word is pretty neat in and of itself since words often change throughout their lifetime.
Google. I think it is amazing how one search engine has become such a crutch that so many rely upon. I can hardly think of the internet before Google. In middle school we would sometimes have assignments that required us going to the computer lab to look things up. They always had a list of various search engines such as Metacrawler and other names you do not hear anymore. Mozilla Firefox has a Google search bar next to the address bar. It’s just so convenient.
The name Google just intrigues me too. It reminds me of googol and googolplex. Some people still think I am crazy when I used these terms. They are just ridiculously large numbers, and I have always assumed that is where Google got their name, which makes total sense to me. Anyway, I love Google and hooray for officially influencing our language and dictionaries!
2 comments:
Google has changed the web so much if you think about. I can really see why one would put it in the dictionary. I suppose anything commonly used that someone may want to know the meaning of, but yeah, pretty interesting it actually made it in there. good post.
-Sean
I use google to find just about anything when I need to do research on the web. Just like the millions of others that use it too, I have been "googling" with it for some time now. saphir -warf - " perception shapes our reality" and language does as well... ( its a reflection of our perception).
So if we have been using google as an every day thing, it only seems logical that it would be incorporated into our language as well. I have to admit though, the original " google" , will always mean 1 with a hundred zero's after it to me. that's a big number...
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