Out with the old words, in with the new

For its 100th anniversary, the Concise Oxford English dictionary added 400 new words to its pages. Retweet, woot, sexting and jeggings are now considered real words. Experts at the Collins English Dictionary have also compiled a list of endangered words that are considered obsolete. Among them, "wittol," a man who tolerates his wife's infidelity. So which words should stay, and which should go?

Guests

• Ben Zimmer: Linguist, lexicographer, language columnist, and all-around word nut. He is the executive producer of Visual Thesaurus and Vocabulary.com, and he is the former On Language columnist for The New York Times Magazine. He has worked as editor for American dictionaries at Oxford University Press and as a consultant to the Oxford English Dictionary.
• Grant Barrett: Lexicographer and dictionary editor specializing in slang and new words. He's most well-known as host of the public radio program A Way with Words, broadcast from coast to coast. He also runs the online Double-Tongued Dictionary, which tracks slang, jargon, and neologisms from the fringes of English.

Resources

• About Ben Zimmer
• About Grant Barrett