Where do new words come from?

Thierry Fontenelle, one of our PMs who is particularly good at lexical issues, forwarded this interesting article from Tuscon Citizen that discusses how Webster's New World College Dictionary puts new words into their dictionary. We use lexicons all over the place around here, in everything from our speech reco engines to the natural language components we build into our spell-checkers, so we care about which words are real. I think it's interesting that Webster's has a 3-year waiting period before they decide to add new words, apparently because they want to see whether something is just a fad or has real staying power. A lot of the words we use can't wait that long. After all, if everybody suddenly wants to spell "Elian Gonzalez" or "Hurricane Rita", who are we to argue? And if after the election, nobody talks about John Kerry anymore, our SR accuracy would go up if we can somehow note in our lexicon that it's less important.