The Need for an Update to the Newfoundland Dictionary Artwork

Newfoundland Boy

Newfoundland Boy is about the Canadian province of Newfoundland. There's a new episode every Saturday, available (with transcripts) wherever you get podcasts. Logo art: Untitled painting by Wayne Jones ››› Music: "slowmotion montage where we fall in love" by human gazpacho, via Free Music Archive under CC BY-NC Creative Commons license ››› © 2025 by Wayne Jones

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Newfoundland Boy

The Need for an Update to the Newfoundland Dictionary

July 12, 2025 • Wayne Jones

The state of the Dictionary of Newfoundland English and other books about and including Newfie words

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Sources

■ “About the OED,” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford University Press, 2025, https://www.oed.com/information/about-the-oed |

■ Sandra Clarke, Newfoundland and Labrador English, Edinburgh University Press, 2018 |

■ Dictionary of Newfoundland English, 2nd edition with Supplement, edited by G.M. Story, W.J. Kirwin and J.D.A. Widdowson, Heritage Newfoundland & Labrador, 1982, https://www.heritage.nf.ca/dictionary/ |

■ Mike Ellis, Newfoundland Slanguage: A Fun Visual Guide to Newfoundland Terms and Phrases, Gibbs Smith, 2019 |

■ The Flanker Dictionary of Newfoundland English, edited by Garry Cranford, Flanker Press, 2018 |

■ Memorial University, Digital Archives Initiative, Dictionary of Newfoundland English Word Slip Forms, “skeet,” https://collections.mun.ca/digital/collection/elrcdne/id/49823/rec/7 |

■ Nellie P. Strowbridge, The Newfoundland Tongue, Flanker Press, 2008 |

Hi, I’m Wayne Jones. Welcome to Newfoundland Boy, a podcast about the Canadian province of Newfoundland. This is episode 37: “The Need for an Update to the Newfoundland Dictionary.”

In a certain way Newfoundland is really fortunate in that there is not only an authoritative and scholarly dictionary of Newfoundland English, and in fact a second edition of the dictionary that was published with a supplement printed at the end. Not only that, but the entire text is now freely available online with the text of the supplement incorporated (see the show notes for a link). That’s the good news. The bad news is that the text has not been updated since that second edition was published, and that was in 1990.

Thirty-five years is a long time for any dictionary to go without being brought up to date, but Newfoundland English is also such a rich and colourful variation of standard English that the update gap is particularly unfortunate. And of course 1990 was around the time that the internet was becoming popular and causing new words and meanings to be added to English in general. I still remember that I was working at the National Library of Canada when I got my first email address and got to use a computer with a browser so that I could get my first look at the web. How things have changed: before I go to bed tonight I could easily create my own email address for myself as well as my own website, and still have time to watch a movie.

In the broader context, outside of the specific example of Newfoundland, the English language is supremely blessed to have the online Oxford English Dictionary, one of the most admirable scholarly achievements in any discipline, in any language, and in any country. As its own website says accurately, the OED is “an unsurpassed guide to the meaning, history, and usage of 500,000 words and phrases past and present, from across the English-speaking world.” It covers and includes not only words from current English, but also words (some of them obsolete) going back as far as the 11th century. Yes, words from a thousand years ago, and with quotations from written sources to support the definitions. It’s an amazing resource—I always feel kind of humbled when I use it—and the better news for the OED than for the Dictionary of Newfoundland English is that it is regularly updated. The last update was last month, and there have been fourteen updates since March 2022.

The main reason for the lack of a single update, let alone ongoing updates, to the Newfoundland English dictionary is likely financial. The original publisher, the University of Toronto Press, likely has higher priorities, and it realizes that if you publish a dictionary these days it’s necessary to have an edition in print, plus an online edition that you commit to keep up to date indefinitely. The other reason is that you need a scholar or group of scholars who have the time and are willing to do the enormous amount of work it would take to bring the dictionary up to the present day. I certainly don’t have any “inside information” about all this, but I’m confident these are the two main reasons.

In the midst of this there are at least two positive things happening. One is that there continues to be popular interest in Newfoundland English, as evidenced by the books of words—aimed at a general readership—that you see in bookstores and in Newfoundland specialty shops that cater both to tourists and to patriotic Newfoundlanders. Perhaps the most substantial of these is The Flanker Dictionary of Newfoundland English (the Flanker in the title referring to the publisher, Flanker Press, located in St. John’s). This is a book of 455 pages, published in 2018, a long list of words with clear and succinct definitions. It has one of my favourite Newfie words, piss quick, which is a “rubber boot cut off at the ankle to make a slipper.” I love the image that it conjures up of waking up in the middle of the night with an urgent need to pee. Well, just slip into your piss quicks and you’ll be in the bathroom in no time!

Flanker Press also published a book called The Newfoundland Tonguein 2008. This is also a dictionary but not a simple list of words in alphabetical order. It is ingeniously and helpfully divided by subject. For example, one of the chapters is called “Burial Terms,” and it includes words such as knobler (a hearse) and also window coffin, which is not a coffin with a little transparent spot in it so that the deceased might be able to take in the view as they make their way to heaven, but rather “a coffin that could not fit through the door of a house [and so] was taken out through a window.”

In addition to these there are lighter (literally and figuratively) books such as Newfoundland Slanguage, which subtitles itself as A Fun Visual Guide to Newfoundland Terms and Phrases. A typical entry is “Nut’n Buy,” that is, N-U-T-APOSTROPHE-N-SPACE-B-U-Y, which is illustrated with a nut, but the real Newfie phrase that it stands for is “nuttin’, b’y,” and that means in standard English, “nothing much.” And there are many more such as this, which I will delve into in a future episode.

I mentioned that there are two positive things going on regarding Newfoundland dictionaries. The second thing is that scholarly work continues, though not yet in the form of undertaking an update to the DNE. One of the major academics in this area is Sandra Clarke, who is a professor emerita at Memorial University. Her book, Newfoundland and Labrador English, was published in 2010 by Edinburgh University Press. Again, it’s not a dictionary, but is rather an informed overview of the state of the language in the province.

Finally, I want to mention a unit of Memorial University which has done extremely broad and detailed scholarly and preservation work dealing with the Dictionary of Newfoundland English and with Newfoundland English in general. Everyone calls it by its acronym, MUNFLA, which stands for the Memorial University Folklore and Language Archive. They have digitized a huge swath of the materials that the editors of the dictionary used in order to compile it, including the note cards they wrote on—remember, this was the ’60s and ’70s—to build the core list of words. It was from the digitized version of one of these cards that I found out only earlier this week why a very popular word in Newfoundland, the word skeet, does not appear in the dictionary. The finding aid has a digitization of the actual card for that word, which has annotations on it mentioning that the word also appears in the Oxford English Dictionary, and so then contains the handwritten queries (to themselves), “Withdraw?” (as a question) and then with the answer, “Agreed.” See a link to the image of that card in the show notes.

And that’s all for this episode. Thanks for listening. As I mentioned, more to come on this topic, hopefully with a few interviews. If you like the show, give me a like. And please join me again next Saturday.

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