'Cassette Tape' removed from Dictionary

Tuesday October 4, 2011

Source: MW

 

Making way for the vocabulary of a new generation has led to the Concise Oxford English Dictionary removing ‘cassette tape’ from its pages.

 

Replacing old-school for new-cool will see words such as ‘retweet’ take a place on the dictionary’s pages instead as its editor-at-large Jesse Sheidlower branded the cassette tape “so past its prime that it was not worth keeping it in."

 

Cassette sales peaked in 1990, eclipsed by the rise and peak of CDs in 2000 which has now made way for digital music.

 

 

As of mid-August this year, cassette album sales stood at 22,000 according to Nielsen Soundscan.

 

Chris Muratore, vice president for merchant services and emerging growth for Nielsen Entertainment commented that although this is substantial considering the amount of new releases, that numbers are still miniscule in comparison to the rest of the market.

Sounds a bit silly. Casettes have still existed. You can't exactly go and say it's not a word. Removing words from the dictionary is completely stupid.

Sounds a bit silly. Casettes have still existed. You can't exactly go and say it's not a word. Removing words from the dictionary is completely stupid.

They're not saying it isn't a word. It will still be included in larger editions of the dictionary. However, there is a limited amount of space in the concise edition. Therefore, whenever new words go in, they have to consider what to remove.

 

Oxford University Press continue to maintain a massive database giving a history of the English language.

It's sad that cassettes (and other physical formats) have died out. :(

 

I remember the days of going into my local Asda and seeing cassettes of the likes of Atomic Kitten's 'Eternal Flame' and S Club 7's S Club album. Weren't the album cassettes like £3.99? :lol:

I remember the days of going into my local Asda and seeing cassettes of the likes of Atomic Kitten's 'Eternal Flame' and S Club 7's S Club album. Weren't the album cassettes like £3.99? :lol:

 

They were about that price around the mid 80s.