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Some included here involve large leaps: “Thought-controlled,” used to describe devices controlled by neural impulses, is pushed back to 1934 from 1977. One of the main goals of historical lexicography is finding antedatings, as instances that push back the earliest known use of a term are called. “The fact that she’s not in here doesn’t mean she’s unimportant. “She’s not, for the most part, using words everyone is using.” he said. Jemisin, whose Broken Earth trilogy, published between 20, won three consecutive Hugo Awards. But writers of “soft science fiction” (defined in the dictionary as science fiction based on soft sciences like anthropology or sociology, or in which science plays a relatively small role), he said, may actually be more innovative in their language. “The harder your science fiction, the more likely you are to be using terms other people are using,” he said. But if an author is not represented, Sheidlower emphasized, that’s not a value judgment. The most cited authors are Robert Heinlein, Poul Anderson and Isaac Asimov.

Users can look up individual words, or browse through subject categories like fandom, weaponry, demonyns (names for beings for particular locations), FTL (shorthand for faster-than-light travel) and, yes, “Star Trek.” The Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction includes some 1,800 separate entries, from “actifan” and “aerocar” to “zero-gravity” and “zine.” Headwords and other display type are rendered in Sagittarius, a new typeface by the designer Jonathan Hoefler, whose original typefaces have appeared on “Star Trek: Picard” (and in The New York Times). “It’s probably good to keep a little distance, just to maintain perspective,” he said. He also had a resource that didn’t yet exist when the original project started: the Internet Archive’s vast collection of digitized - and searchable - pulp magazines.Īs for his own science fiction consumption, Sheidlower described himself as more of a “regular reader” than a superfan.

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(In addition to the editing, he coded the site himself, and shares his research back with the O.E.D.) He turned out to have more free time than he expected, thanks to the pandemic.

in 2013, got permission to continue the project independently. In early 2020, Sheidlower, who left the O.E.D. ( “Brave New Words,” a print historical dictionary based on the project and edited by Jeff Prucher, appeared in 2007.) The goal of that project was to expand the O.E.D.’s coverage of science fiction, something of a gap in its research, by drawing on the reading and knowledge of fans. The science fiction dictionary grew out of the Science Fiction Citations Project, a crowdsourced effort initiated in 2001 by the O.E.D. itself, which attempts to cover the whole of the language, to national dictionaries like the “Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles” to more specialized efforts dedicated to golfing terms or hip-hop. They range from behemoths like the O.E.D. Historical dictionaries aim to show not just what words mean, but who has used them, in what contexts, and how those meanings have evolved. “Jesse doesn’t like to leave any stone unturned,” he said. and the author of “The Making of the Oxford English Dictionary,” called the new online dictionary “quite impressive, and very stylishly presented.” Peter Gilliver, an executive editor at the O.E.D. More recently, Sheidlower, now an independent lexicographer, worked as a language consultant on Amazon’s adaptation of Philip K. In 1995, he published “The F-Word,” a cheekily learned history of the notorious obscenity.

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The dictionary is the latest in a series of eclectic projects for Sheidlower, a former editor at large at the Oxford English Dictionary who first came to prominence in the 1990s, as part of a new generation of lexicographers injecting the field with a fresh nerd-cool factor.