In response to my previous post (and the link I emailed them), I received the email below today.  Hopefully we’ll see “prepend” added to the unabridged dictionary sometime this decade…

Dear Bill:

Thanks for your letter.  As you may know, we enter words in our dictionaries based on their use in current printed and edited sources.  A word is only entered in our dictionaries when it meets three criteria:  widespread usage in well-read publications; established usage over a certain period of time; and an easily discernable definition. For this sense of “prepend” to be entered, then, it will need to appear in a number of well-read print sources for a good number of years.

I did a quick check of our citational files, which house upwards of 17 million citations of words in context, and while we have some evidence of this sense of “prepend,” most of it is highly technical, which does not make it a good candidate for entry into an abridged dictionary like the Online Dictionary.  It may be a candidate for entry into the unabridged _Webster’s Third New International Dictionary_, however.  We will consider it when we next revise that hefty tome.

For more information on how a word is entered into our dictionaries, visit http://www.merriam-webster.com/help/faq/words_in.htm, and if you have any further questions or comments, please contact us again.

Sincerely,
Kory Stamper, Associate Editor
Merriam-Webster, Inc.

Dr. Frederick C. Mish
Editor-in-Chief
Merriam-Webster, Inc.
47 Federal Street
Springfield, MA 01102

Dear Dr. Mish,

Please consider adding the word "prepend" to the Merriam-Webster dictionary.

As you may be aware, folks in the technology world use this word quite frequently in situations where you "append" to the beginning of something.  Prepend’s meaning is synonymous with the definition of the word "prefix", however prepend is more commonly used by technology professionals.

The word is used within several popular software applications such as Postfix, as well as hardware appliances such as Cisco routers.  Googling for prepend returns several thousand of examples of it’s use.

The frequency that the word "prepend" is used today should justify consideration for inclusion in your dictionary.  Even though we are techies, we do not like speaking broken English.

Regards,

Bill Boebel
Chief Technology Officer
Webmail.us, Inc.

SERVER A:

Cpu(s):  7.3% us,  5.6% sy,  0.0% ni, 81.5% id,  0.0% wa,  5.6% hi,  0.0% si

SERVER B:

CPU states:  cpu    user    nice  system    irq  softirq  iowait    idle
            total    5.8%    0.0%   71.5%   1.9%     9.8%    0.0%   10.7%

SERVER A is one of our newer POP3/IMAP proxy servers, running Red Hat ES4 (2.6.9 kernel) with Dovecot compiled to use epoll() to handle network events.  SERVER B is one of our older POP3/IMAP proxy servers, running Red Hat ES3 (2.4.21 kernel) with Dovecot complied to use poll() to handle network events.

Each server is handling an equal number of POP3, POP3, IMAP and IMAPS connections.  Several thousand connections total.  Dovecot is handling all of the connections using one process per port, so 4 processes total.

Notice that SERVER A is mostly idle, while SERVER B is using 71.5% of the CPU to handle system events.  Click on the epoll() and poll() links above to understand why this occurs, and why we are in the process of replacing all of our proxy servers with ES4 + epoll().