t’s official. The word “google”  is now in the dictionary. The newest edition of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary will list the meaning as “to use the Google search engine to obtain information…on the World Wide Web."  We have all heard the word google used as a verb as “Did you google him?”  And how many of you have googled yourself??

According to the experts google appeared in the dictionary quite quickly. It took only 5 years after its first use in a New York Post article. According the Los Angeles Times, the average word is in use colloquially for 10 to 20 years before it is added to the dictionary. The Google search engine made its appearance in 1998, a mere 8 years ago.

Google joins Coca-Cola soda, Band-Aid bandages, Xerox copiers, Kleenex tissues and Jello gelatin as brand names that have become so tied to a product that they have become everyday words.

The capitalization of the word is still in question. Merriam-Webster’s dictionary uses the lower-case form while the Oxford English Dictionary recently added the word in upper-case to its online edition.

Other high tech words that were among the 100 new words in the 11^th edition of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, a standard reference work found in many schools and libraries, include: “spyware,” defined as “software that is installed in a computer without the user's knowledge and transmits information about the user's computer activities over the Internet” and “mouse potato,” slang for someone “who spends a great deal of time using a computer.”

Other Google derivatives may make an appearance in the dictionary in the future. The term  “Googlewhacking” is already in common use. In case you don’t know, it is a kind of game where the participant tries to enter two search words in the Google search engine that produce only a single reference on Google.

The  newer term “fridge-googling”' has been coined to mean looking  at the remnant  contents of a person’s refrigerator and letting the Google search engine find a recipe that uses those ingredients.

BTW, if your computer spell checker still puts red squiggles under the word google, just right-click on the word and choose “Add to Dictionary” to add google to your own dictionary.