BEYOND THE COINAGE DATE: LEXICOGRAPHIC RECOGNITION AND SEMANTIC RENEWAL IN CONTEMPORARY ENGLISH

This paper distinguishes the historical creation of a lexical form from the later public prominence, semantic recontextualisation and dictionary recognition of that form. A qualitative examination of English expressions documented by Oxford and Cambridge in 2024-2025 shows that established items such as brain rot and parasocial may be wrongly classified as recent coinages. A four-question annotation framework is proposed for future diachronic and corpus-informed neologism research. The paper does not report new corpus frequencies.