VICTORIA — An editor at Oxford Dictionaries in the United Kingdom has sent an encouraging response to a six-year-old Victoria boy who created a buzz by inventing a word.
Levi Budd came up with levidrome to define a word that forms a different word when spelled backwards, such as rats from star and loop from pool.
His father posted a YouTube video five weeks ago to explain that Levi started with the word stop and discovered it becomes pots and then came up with levidrome to define the feat of flipping words.
#Levidrome, a name for a word which makes a different word when spelled backwards, was brought to our attention by @Lucky_Budd and @WilliamShatner a couple of weeks ago. pic.twitter.com/nXhfbVlAE7
— Oxford Dictionaries (@OxfordWords) November 23, 2017
Actor William Shatner saw the video and contacted Oxford Dictionaries on Twitter after the family had already been in touch with Merriam-Webster, which replied a word has to be commonly used before it can be added to its dictionary.
Now, an editor at Oxford has responded with a video, saying many clever and useful words are created every year but a word can only make it into its dictionary if lots of people use it over a long time.
The editor says plenty of people are uttering levidrome early into Levi's campaign, which is impressive, and staff will decide in about a year whether its use is widespead enough to get the word into the dictionary.
