I was cleaning up my home office a while ago. (Yes, Rabbi Miriam, I admit it was a long time ago.) Part of the process was boxing up old books for donation. Somewhere along the way, it occurred to me to check with the public library to see what they would actually accept — and there’s a list of materials that they don’t want. There were the obvious ones: Magazines. Phone books. Outdated travel guides. Older textbooks. And one that threw me for a moment: encyclopedias. But of course, that made sense. Very few people are willing to devote yards of shelf space to a hundred pounds of secondhand, outdated paper. Even Britannica is a website now.
The major dictionaries have migrated online as well. I will admit to being old enough to experience some nostalgia for the big hardback American Heritage dictionary in my house growing up. The online dictionary sites have some features to commend them, though. Merriam-Webster’s Time Travel page can show you the year that words and phrases were first used in print. (The year I was born yielded such gems as “rest area”, “overdiagnosis”, and “kickboxing”).
Near the top of the list, though, was a word first used in 2020:
“Doomscrolling: to spend excessive time online scrolling through news or other content that makes one feel sad, anxious, or angry.”