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Do you know what a bullshot is, or an obesogen? You might be able to guess, but unless you鈥檙e a word nut it would be hard to check, were it not for a new kind of online dictionary that puts the meaning and origin of bizarre and novel words like these just a click away.

Until recently, our main source of what words mean has been the tried and trusted paper dictionary. As reference works, these venerable tomes are still invaluable, but for tracking the dynamic changes that languages continually undergo, they can be too slow-footed. Their entry criteria are often extremely strict, and even dictionaries of slang sometimes require a word to be in use for a decade or so before it is included.

That gap is now being plugged in cyberspace. The availability of millions of online newspapers, blogs and digitised book databases such as , combined with free search tools, is transforming the job of dictionary compilation. This in turn has led to a clutch of websites filled with new words and trends in language, run by amateur lexicographers. 鈥淭here is an explosion in this kind of work,鈥� says Grant Barrett, a freelance lexicographer based in New York who is also vice-president of the

The result is a new kind of dictionary that can be updated every day and has no size limits. These dictionary sites are even making it easier for professional lexicographers to keep track of how language is changing, and so help keep these reference works up to date.

Barrett helps run , where bullshot and obesogen are among the many recent new words listed (they mean, respectively, that has been enhanced to promote the game itself, and ). To populate the site, he searches newspapers, blogs and magazines for phrases like 鈥渒nown to fans as鈥� or 鈥渃oined the word鈥� which are likely to precede newly minted words. Having found a new word, Barrett researches the term more thoroughly, usually looking for repeated uses before including it. The site moves fast enough to capture definitions of words that are out there now but may not hang around long enough to make it into a traditional dictionary.

The web is also allowing word nuts to geek out in another way: hunting down when and where a term originated, an activity that used to require a painstaking trawl through the archives of newspapers and magazines. As digital versions of these collections are continually being posted online, these terms can now be dated much more quickly. The emergence of such databases has also spawned informal competitions in which amateurs vie to identify the earliest use of a particular term.

A number of these contests have been won by Barry Popik, a lawyer who in his spare time runs a blog about food-related words called . Popik is a contributor and consultant to several dictionaries, often on his pet topic of food terms, and is an authority on the origin of 鈥渉ot dog鈥�.

Last October, a search of the newly digitised archives of the San Antonio Express News in Texas allowed Popik to shed new light on how the word 鈥渘acho鈥� originated. A 1950s recipe book recorded it as coming from the nickname of a chef in the Mexican frontier town of Piedras Negras 鈥� but was that just a folk tale? On the archive, Popik found several newspaper articles that gave the same account of the story, independently of the book.

Similarly, in 2002, Popik used the digital archives of the 19th-century Brooklyn Daily Eagle newspaper to locate one of the earliest mentions of 鈥渂aseball鈥�, then written as two separate words, and what he says is the first ever mention of 鈥渃hop suey鈥�.

Online dictionaries like these are also a great resource for professional lexicographers. The Oxford English Dictionary has used contributions from amateurs from around the time of its first publication in 1884. Volunteers continue to send in clippings from newspapers and magazines containing examples of new words, or different uses for old ones. Now the web has turbocharged that kind of work.

Take . Anyone can submit a word to this site, and as its editors do not verify new entries there鈥檚 no way of knowing whether a term that appears in Urban Dictionary is used by anyone other than the person who sent it in. It does have one overwhelming strength, though: the sheer volume of material is contains. Hundreds of words are entered every day, making it a useful first point of call for anyone wanting to check up on claims about a new word. 鈥淭here is often bogus information there,鈥� says Ben Zimmer, a dictionaries editor at Oxford University Press in New York. 鈥淏ut if someone is using a word, the chances are very good that it will be put on Urban Dictionary.鈥�

He recently used the site to check out claims that the word 鈥渟ubprime鈥� had a meaning other than the financial one that has become all too well known. According to some media reports last month, students were talking about having 鈥渟ubprimed鈥� a test, but when Zimmer checked Urban Dictionary, the new use was not there. It is far from a definitive test, but Zimmer says it was enough to make him sceptical about the media reports.

Another amateur site that the pros turn to is the blog, written by Mark Peters (see 鈥淗ow Wordlustitude feeds my obsession鈥�). He has tracked the use of infixes 鈥� words inserted into the middle of other words. Some of the best-known examples come from the TV cartoon series The Simpsons, where the eternally cheerful character Ned Flanders has coined phrases such as 鈥渋n-diddly-different鈥� and 鈥渨el-diddly-come鈥�. Peters鈥檚 collection of 鈥渄iddly鈥� words caught the attention of Michael Adams, a linguist at Indiana University, Bloomington. According to Adams, infixes have been used in poetry for centuries but spoken infixes have appeared only in the last few decades. Peters鈥檚 collection provides further evidence that this is true.

Another aspect of the 鈥渄iddly鈥� collection has also been of particular interest to linguists. They had previously assumed that one-syllable words could not be infixed. But 鈥渄iddly鈥� shows that rule can be broken: 鈥淪hi-diddly-it鈥�, which has cropped up in blogs unrelated to The Simpsons, is one example. Adams, who cites Peters鈥檚 work in a book on slang due to be published this year, says this works in spoken English because the 鈥測鈥� at the end of 鈥渄iddly鈥� smoothes the transition into the end of the infixed word.

Writing on the blog, Zimmer credits Wordlustitude for the 鈥渨ild discoveries鈥� of words ending in 鈥渓icious鈥�, such as kegelicious, tentaclicious and non-suckalicious. Zimmer says that Peters鈥檚 鈥渓icious鈥� observations show that the suffix is being used more than it was previously. 鈥淲hat once was an occasional delectation is now just a bit too overkillicious,鈥� he writes.

So as Urban Dictionary, Double-Tongued Dictionary and Wordlustitude provide up-to-the-minute updates on language, and detail words that traditional dictionaries may miss, do they call into question the future of traditional dictionaries? Barrett and other lexicographers reject any such suggestion, pointing out that the basics of language move slowly. New slang crops up daily, but most of it quickly disappears. By waiting years or even decades before deciding whether to include a new word, dictionary editors are able to make a better judgement on how language is really changing.

The value of amateur listings lies in the extra dimension they add to word hunting. 鈥淣o savvy lexicographer ignores Urban Dictionary,鈥� Barrett wrote on his blog in 2006. 鈥淚ts visitors might seem like a million chimps trying to hammer out Shakespeare, but among the useless words are gems that do indeed deserve to be on the record.鈥�