how it's done
FT.com / Who left the Wags out?
... Is it true that a word needs to have been in use for 10 years before it can make it into the OED? It is only a rule of thumb, Diamond says; the editors exercise their judgment. “But underlying the 10-year rule of thumb is something that points to how philosophically different the OED is from other dictionaries, and that is our responsibility not just to tell you what a word means but to give you a historical perspective on it. That’s the reason we won’t be publishing ‘Wag’ any time soon, because we want to see what happens to it.”Still, says Diamond, if a new word does become commonly used and understood in a wide enough context, if its meaning has stabilised and if the word shows no signs of fading away, the 10-year rule may be bent - as it was for “chav”, which was published in the online OED in 2006, only eight years after its first verifiable use in 1998.
Surely, though, people were using “chav” colloquially before 1998? Very likely they were, Diamond says, but unless someone can provide hard, documentary evidence, “we can’t do anything about it, because one of our principles is that everything we cite must be verifiable. We can’t just have someone saying: ‘I was using this in 1992.’” The spoken word is no use if it goes unrecorded - although, interestingly, an internet quotation may be usable if it can be printed out and kept in the archives.
From an interesting and engagingly-written article on the current state of the Oxford English Dictionary.