I Stan ‘Stan’ Being Added to Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary

Merriam-Webster’s isn’t just any ordinary dictionary.  They’re a cool dictionary.  And they’ve recently added ‘stan’ to their official list of words and I stan them for it.

According to Merriam-Webster, ‘stan’ is defined as the following:

stan noun
\ ˈstan \
plural stans
slang, often disparaging
: an extremely or excessively enthusiastic and devoted fan

stan verb
stanned; stanning; stans
slang, often disparaging
: to exhibit fandom to an extreme or excessive degree : to be an extremely devoted and enthusiastic fan of someone or something

We here at The Geekiary know a little something about stanning.  Part of our slogan is, “We’re fans. We have a lot of feelings.  This is where we talk about them.”  In fact, I actually stan quite a few stans.  I stan Sebastian Stan.  And I stan Stan Lee.  I also think Stan the Dinosaur is pretty cool, (though I’m partial to Sue the T-Rex, but let’s be real, they’re both pretty awesome).  There are many Stans to stan.

But what does this actually mean?  Merriam-Webster is actually fairly ground breaking when it comes to the types of words they choose to include in their dictionary.  Let’s throw back a bit to this classic moment:

People keep
1) saying they don’t know what ‘genderqueer’ means

then

2) asking why we added it to the dictionary pic.twitter.com/wsGZ7Y6XB8

— Merriam-Webster (@MerriamWebster) April 25, 2016

They understand that language evolves, and they take their job as a curator of current language trends very seriously.  I’ve got mad respect for what they do and how they do it. And their social media team, with their quippy responses and brilliant headlines, only add to my adoration of them.  For a dictionary, they’re pretty damn amazing.

‘Stan’ isn’t the only word they added this year.  It’s one of 640 words added along side ‘on-brand‘ (posting about geeky stuff is ‘on-brand’ for us), ‘screen time‘ (I average about 10 hours of screen time per day and I feel slightly bad about that), and ‘page view‘ (you, dear reader, are adding to the Geekiary’s page views. Thank you!).

So cheers to you, Merriam-Webster.  I shall stan you to the end of my days… then probably keep stanning some more.

Author: Angel Wilson

Angel is the admin of The Geekiary and a geek culture commentator. They earned a BA in Film & Digital Media from UC Santa Cruz. They have contributed to various podcasts and webcasts including An Englishman in San Diego, Free to Be Radio, and Genre TV for All. They identify as queer.

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