Merging professional and collaborative Lexicography: The case of Czech neology

Abstract

This paper aims to relate two linguistic phenomena: neology (along with sources for its study) and collaborative lexicography. A pair of case studies is presented concerning two thematically defined groups of recent Czech neologisms: those abusing the Czech ex-president V. Havel's name and those reflecting the Covid-19 pandemic. An initial dataset was provided by the user-generated content web dictionary of non-standard Czech Čeština 2.0 and the Neomat neology database, fostered by professional linguists. The objective data from a monitor corpus of Czech is used in contrast with the initial dataset and thereby leads to some open questions, especially with regards to the extent to which amateur and professional, two branches of lexicography, can inspire and enrich each other.