13 October 2025
Numbers with lots of zeroes after them seem to have significance, even if they don’t really. Back in March 2020, in the midst of the Covid lockdown, I started a wholesale revision of the Wordorigins.org Big List. Some of the entries were very old, dating to the 1990s. And today, I posted the entry that in my internal list is numbered 1,000, that is the entry for Mecca. In the revising, I went year by year, starting with the oldest entries, and within a particular year roughly alphabetically. Currently, I’m updating entries that were first posted in 2019.
Mecca is not, however, actually the 1,000th revision. There are new entries in that count. And at times, I drafted entries that jumped the queue, being assigned an additional letter so that I didn’t have to renumber the entire list (like 927a conclave). And I’ve even started to revise some of the new entries I added since the revision project started. (Calvinball is both 802a and 997.) So there have been more than 1,000 posts to the Big List since I started the revision project. But the ticking over onto 1,000 seems like a good opportunity to give an update on the project, even if it isn’t actually the 1,000th post since it started.
If I keep to the current pace with no unplanned new entries, I’ll post the last revision (notorious) on 9 March 2026, some six years after starting. And true to form, that won’t actually be the last revision, just the last one as part of the wholesale revision project. I’ll keep updating individual entries as needed. This will be the last (and only) time I attempt such a complete revision.
I’m also thinking about how to best archive the site. While I have no plans to stop, there will come a time when I am no longer able or willing to keep the site up to date, both in terms of content and software infrastructure. I could just leave it to Archive.org’s “Way Back Machine,” but I’m contemplating if there should be a backup to that. Currently my thinking is to just create a giant PDF file (or files) of all the content, which will be fairly effortless on my part. The PDF format, since it is so ubiquitous, should remain readable for decades to come. Even if Adobe goes under, which doesn’t seem likely anytime soon, someone will maintain a PDF reader. If anyone has any ideas on this front, please let me know.
