Either it was a slow news day – or this really is something. Every news outlet imaginable has officially reported that the word "podcast" has been added to the New Oxford American Dictionary. In fact, it's been declared the Word of the Year.

Declaring a “Word of the Year” is heady business for dictionary enterprises and language aficionados alike, and there are many ways to arrive at one. Just last year, the Merriam-Webster folks told us that “blog” was their top choice, and they based it on a simple statistic: It was the single most requested word at its online website.

With “podcast” this year and “blog” the last, how can we be assured these technologies aren’t just fads? Dictionary people hate fads, and go to some effort to avoid them. It’s why the Oxford folks actually rejected the term “podcast” just one year ago. But this year it came on full-steam, so much so that it was both added and garnered “Word of the Year” status at the very same time.

If they only had another award, it could have been a hat trick. Which is also in their dictionary.

Now, I’m more an engineer than a wordsmith, but I had to wonder about the actual definition the Oxford folks came up with for “podcast.” They define it as "a digital recording of a radio broadcast or similar program, made available on the Internet for downloading to a personal audio player." And under “Derivatives,” they also list the noun “podcasting.” Its “Origin” reads “early 21st century: from iPod, a proprietary name for a personal audio player.”

Golly. Early 21st century! That would be right about … now!

And we all know about “now.” It’s a tricky business to fix a meaning on anything related to technology, since the one thing you can depend on when it comes to technology is change. In truth, Oxford’s definition is already inaccurate. Whether or not you agree with the word “radio” in the basic definition, Apple recently launched an iPod which also plays video.

Maybe next year, “podcast” will get recognized as the “Re-Defined Word of the Year.”

Graeme Diamond is a member of the committee that decides on new words for the Oxford English Dictionary, the Granddaddy – if you will – of the New Oxford American Dictionary, which we’ve been referring to. He writes: “A rule of thumb is that any word can be included which appears five times, in five different printed sources, over a period of five years.” And here the technology monster rears its head in earnest.

Five years is about eight generations of hardware chips, and two full generations of applications software. And do printed sources mean printed on paper? Or is online good enough? The committee has to be doing its verification online, and not collecting bits of paper in some humongous filing cabinet.

Of course, I’m being a bit disingenuous here. The Oxford English Dictionary is glacial, both in size and in the speed at which it is updated in print. Its last full publication was in 1989, when it weighed in at an impressive 151 pounds, and its 22,000 pages were bound into 20 volumes. Its next projected full round is not anticipated until 2018 or possibly later.

No matter what, it seems to me that the dictionary business is booming. And the reason is … technology. Never in the history of man could words be created so effortlessly, and could their use be spread so rapidly. The only hitch is … the days of dictionaries printed on paper may be numbered.

We’ll just have to wait around until 2018 and see.

I'm Moira Gunn. This is Five Minutes.