Every day for the past several years I have tried to complete the New York Times Crossword in an app on my iPhone, with varying levels of success. Several months ago they added a new game to the app called Spelling Bee. Whenever I’m flailing on the crossword, which is nearly every day, I switch over to Spelling Bee to try my luck. In Spelling Bee you are presented with seven letters and the objective is to find as many English words with four or more letters using only the seven you’re given. And to make it more challenging, one of those letters you have to use in every word. You get points for every word you find, and if you find a high percentage of all the possible words you can reach Genius level, and who doesn’t want to reach that?
For example, here are today’s letters O-T-H-U-D-N and (G), where G has to appear in every word. So right away I see the ough combination and can real off a bunch of words: dough, tough, thought, ought. But once you pick off all the easy words, it gets much harder. At some point I start typing random combinations of consonants and vowels and hoping they count as a word. And every so often I hit the right combination of letters to make a word I didn’t even know existed. For example, today I typed “doggo” and the game counted it as a word. So a quick Google search later I find that according to Merriam-Webster, doggo, or to lie doggo, means to stay in hiding to avoid detection, like a submarine at sea.
Yet according to a 2018 article in Wired, the Merriam Webster definition was just a little behind the times given the rise of the use of doggo as an affectionate term for dogs. Same old doggo word, but a brand new and more intuitive usage given its playful kinship to the word dog. The article goes on to explain how doggo was first used in an Australian Facebook group about dogs and was spread by social media use to the point that the folks at Merriam Webster had this new usage on their radar, or sonar as the case may be. Apparently, this resurrection of the word doggo would not lie doggo from the editors of America’s favorite dictionary.
“Doggo.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/doggo. Accessed 12 Aug. 2022.