Skiplagging Has Reached a New Level of Acceptance

Despite being hundreds of years old and with over a million words to choose from, the English language is always evolving. New words and phrases are constantly being developed, to the tune of over 5,000 new ones per year. Of those, about 1,000 or so are deemed to be in sufficiently widespread use that they make it into common usage.

That being said, it takes time for lexicographers (those are people who write, compile and edit dictionaries for print and online publication) to determine that any particular word or phrase is well-established enough to be added to their respective dictionaries.

“We have a kind of reflex to wait,” Peter Sokolowski, editor at large for Merriam Webster, told WGBH. “[We want] to make sure that the word has staying power; that it’s going to be around for a long time.”

It doesn’t always work like that (Covid-19 made it into most dictionaries within a month of the pandemic hitting the world), but relatively common words such as “trigger,” and powerful ones like “Brexit,” didn’t make it into dictionaries until years, if not decades after the words became established (the word “Sodoku” has been around since the 1980s but didn’t make it into a dictionary until 2007. “Ginormous” also made Merriam Webster that year, even though the word could be traced back to 1948).

Anyway, to that end, Dictionary.com, which was launched in 1995, just announced it added 327 new entries, 173 new definitions for existing entries and 1,228 revised definitions to their online dictionary. And along with other newbies to the platform, such as greedflation, Tommy John surgery, and Tabata, their newest travel-related word was also added: skiplagging.

Here’s what they say about the popular travel hack:

With a phonetic respelling as / ˈskɪpˌlæg ɪŋ /, Dictionary.com also says that the verb form is skiplag, a compound of skip, “to pass over,” and lag, “an instance of staying behind.”

Airlines, of course, are not fans of skiplagging. But with the word’s introduction into Dictionary.com, lexicographers have apparently accepted that the travel hack is here to stay.

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