"There's only one rule for a new word getting in: If it's likely to be found in printed reading matter - magazines, newspapers, novels - it's likely to get in," Peter Sokolowski, an associate editor for Merriam-Webster, told MTV News. "Our entire staff reads and marks everything we can get our hands on: Vibe magazine, magazines on pregnancy and sailing, math journals, physics journals, soup-can labels, menus. Basically, when a word gains a critical mass of citations, we'll include it.

"We try to include words that aren't just trends," he continued. "We're looking for words that will be referred to in the future and people won't need any explanation to know what it means. If the editor of a newspaper can publish a word and he or she expects readers to know what it means, we'll include it."

Sokolowski said that in the case of a word like crunk, they had followed its use from the pages of hip-hop publications to magazines like Sports Illustrated and finally into Time and The New York Times. And yes, he's aware that including crunk in the dictionary suggests that it's no longer a "cool" word (this actually happened sometime around 2002), but that's just another part of the process: When your parents know what a word means, it's probably about time to include it in the dictionary.