New words don't just get invented

What actually happened

The misunderstanding is about what a dictionary is. Modern lexicography is descriptive: editors monitor huge corpora of published text, look for words used widely, in varied sources, over sustained time, and record them. Merriam-Webster's criteria are frequency, breadth, and duration of use. The dictionary follows the language; it does not license it.

'Google' is the clean example, and an unusually awkward one. It entered Merriam-Webster and the OED as a verb in 2006, ten years after the company existed, because everyone was already using it that way. Google's lawyers were unhappy, since a trademark that becomes a generic verb risks genericide, the fate of aspirin, escalator, and thermos. Both dictionaries kept the entry.

The pace of intake is what the old teaching missed. Merriam-Webster added 690 words in 2023 alone. The OED updates quarterly. 'Rizz' was Oxford's 2023 Word of the Year, roughly a year after it emerged. Anyone taught that the dictionary is a closed and sacred list was taught the opposite of how it works, and the words that have entered since you graduated are a decent measure of how much time has passed.