Dictionaries of Internet Terms: The 1990s

ABSTRACT: The opening up of the Internet to large-scale public access from the early 1990s was attended by a proliferation of words associated with, referring to, and circulating on the Internet. A great many dictionaries of such Internet terms were published in the course of the decade, which effectively constituted a distinctive vocabulary. This vocabulary was unusually fluid and quickly socially grounded. Dictionaries of Internet terms worked with somewhat different ideas of authority and usage from those of standard ordinary-language or technical and professional dictionaries. This paper considers the development of such dictionaries in that decade, with some necessary attention to earlier and later trajectories. Categories relevant to dictionaries of Internet terms are proposed and the relationship between them considered in a broadly chronological order. Thus, this paper offers a brief history of a neglected area of dictionary-making and an unusual historicist perspective on a formative period of the Internet. Five categories of dictionaries are considered and the relationships between them noted. Three of these started appearing before the Internet became a widely availed public feature: computer technology dictionaries for professional and pedagogic purposes, dictionaries of computer terms for laypersons, and, influentially, hacker slang/jargon dictionaries. Elements of these converged in the 1990s on dictionaries of Internet terms, within which several subcategories can be discerned. A fifth category taken up here is an offshoot of the latter: cyberdictionaries of Internet terms and slang.