“Dumpster fire” added to dictionary

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This article was published 10/03/2018 (3047 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In 2008, a user at Urban Dictionary defined the “dumpster fire.” The figurative one, that is: 1. A complete disaster; 2. Something very difficult that nobody wants to deal with.

“It’s a very serious entry from Urban Dictionary, very well drafted,” said Peter Sokolowski, editor-at-large at Merriam-Webster, which introduced the dumpster fire to its own online version this week.

Merriam-Webster’s definition? “An utterly calamitous or mismanaged situation or occurrence.”

A lot has happened for the dumpster fire in the 10 years since Urban Dictionary first took a crack at defining it. In that short span of time, a “dumpster fire” has become a metaphor for, say, what it’s like to be alive and online in the present day. A dumpster fire is simply understood, immediately recognizable.

And these reasons are why the dumpster fire was a perfect candidate for inclusion in Merriam-Webster, Sokolowski said in a Tuesday interview.

When considering which words and phrases to define, lexicographers “look for the removal of linguistic white gloves,” Sokolowski said, meaning it’s no longer a rare species. When the word of phrase appears in, say, a news article with an explanation of its meaning, then it’s on the cusp. What the dictionary makers look for is what comes next, when the “writer presumes that the reader knows what it means.”

Dumpster fire was one of hundreds of new phrases and words the dictionary introduced into its online version on Monday.

How did it spread? I searched for tweets before 2008 that mention the term, and of the few that weren’t about literal dumpster fires, I found a handful about sports.

That matched the searches Sokolowski and I ran in Nexis, a database of news article archives. One 2011 newspaper article from the Times Herald in Port Huron, Mich., about Big Ten football contained the following: “I think Ohio State is at the bottom of that list, but the Buckeyes spend so much time rotating between competent team and dumpster fire it’s tough to tell.”

In 2010, the Winnipeg Free Press wrote that “The Chargers are in the midst of pulling their season out of a dumpster fire and this gets them in the clear.”

— Washington Post