One day in the spring of 2003—before Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and the iPhone, and around the same time that the first podcasts came to be—I was listening to one of my favorite radio shows, The Next Big Thing, which aired on WNYC and was syndicated by Public Radio International from 2000 to 2005. When they got to a segment called « What’s Your Word? » in which listeners pitched words they thought should be in the dictionary to the show’s host, Dean Olsher, and lexicographer and Wordnik founder Erin McKean (who at the time was an editor at the New Oxford American Dictionary and Verbatim), I called in with two food-related words that I thought would be sure hits: « breastaurant » and « hangry. »
History would prove me right about one of the words, but at the time, Olsher and McKean weren’t sold. I caught up with the two of them in May of 2024—21 years after the segment first aired on May 9, 2003—to get their reflections on my words. We discussed the very slow and then very quick rise of “hangry,” which has been around since at least the 1910s, but didn’t reach cultural saturation until around 2015 and only made it into the Oxford English Dictionary in 2018, but can now be found printed on socks, T-shirts, tote bags, and (of course) in magazines, newspapers, and websites, with no explanation needed. Our discussion of the two words also provides a fascinating (to this particular word geek, anyway) look behind the curtain at the often unpredictable way some words climb into regular, dictionary-approved usage and some don’t.
McKean also makes the excellent point that print dictionaries have a motive to limit their lexicon at least in part because of the physical nature of the product—in the digital age, there’s no need for such limits, and language can evolve much more quickly. Philosophy of language aside, poring through the archives of The Next Big Thing to look back at past predictions with the benefit of hindsight was a fun exercise, which I highly recommend when you have some time to spare.
Skip to minute 37:55 in the episode « It’s Not Over » on the WNYC website to listen to the full May 9, 2003 “What’s Your Word?” segment or to 43:25 for just my bit, or read on for the transcript of my call, then continue below for my recent Q&A with McKean and Olsher.
Pitching Hangry: Full 2003 Transcript
Dean: Hi, who’s this?
Megan: This is Megan Steintrager.
Dean: Megan, where are you calling from?
Megan: I am actually calling from Yonkers, where I work, and I live in New York City.
Dean: And you have a word for us?
Megan: I do. My word is « breastaurant. » [Erin and Dean laugh]
Dean: Like Hooters? Would Hooters be a breastaurant?
Megan: Yep, you got it right away. And my mother actually came up with this word, which I think is pretty funny. She was just driving by and she said, “Have you kids ever been to that breastaurant?” We were all floored.
Dean: Is it spelled “b-r-e-s” or “b-r-e-a-s”?
Megan: I spell it “b-r-e-a-s.” I actually have another word if I can pitch that too.
Erin: What’s the other one?
Dean: Go for it!
Megan: It kind of ties into breastaurant.
Erin: Please don’t tell me it’s like the male chain…
Megan: [Interrupts Erin] No, no, no, no. It’s, uh, “hangry.”
Erin: Hangry?
Megan: Hangry.
Erin: When you’re so hungry, you’re just ready to rip someone’s head off?
Megan: Exactly! It comes up a lot on road trips, you know, when you can’t find anywhere to eat.
Dean: You’re getting so hangry…
Megan: Or you’re stuck in a meeting that’s going through lunch.
Erin: Or that uncomfortable early evening time, when it’s not time for dinner yet, yet lunch was so very far away.
Megan: Right, yes. I had one boyfriend who always wanted to go out for a drink before dinner and so I would be, like, secretly having a meal before we went out so that I didn’t become hangry.
Dean: I’ve totally done that. I’m guessing that Megan’s gonna have an easier time with “breastaurant” than with “hangry,” right?
Erin: I’m thinking that there’s already a method for making words that mean anger connected to something. We have “desk rage,” and “computer rage,” and “road rage,” and “plane rage.”
Megan: [sounding disappointed] Right. So it’d be “hunger rage.”
Erin: Yeah.
Megan: [sounding defeated and resigned] Yeah.
Dean: Well listen, Megan, thank you very much.
Megan: Thank you.
Dean: Okay.
Megan: All right.
Dean: Be well.
Megan: Bye.
Dean Olsher and Erin McKean Share Their Thoughts on Hangry in 2024
As I mentioned above, I recently caught up with Olsher and McKean via email to ask them why they were so sure that “hangry” wouldn’t be the huge success it’s become. They were great sports about it. Read on for the details.
Megan: Could you give a little history/background of the “What’s Your Word?” segment you hosted on the Next Big Thing?
Erin: I went back and checked my email (I’m a digital packrat, I keep everything) and it looks like I got an email from Dean Olsher in January of 2002. At that point I’d been working for Oxford University Press for about a year and a half or so. He wanted to do “something language related” for the show, and we had a call and batted around some ideas. The first segment aired in April of 2002, I think.
Megan: When you heard my pitch of “hangry,” what was it that made you think it wouldn’t take off? Could you speculate on why you had the original reaction you had to my pitch?
Erin: I think I’m going to have to borrow a famous reply of Samuel Johnson’s here and say, « Ignorance, madam, pure ignorance. » One of the things I love about working with words is that sometimes we just don’t know why one word succeeds and another fails, or why a word has a moment of popularity and then falls from favor.
When I was working on traditional dictionaries, our big constraint was the size of the printed book—so we were more in a mode of looking for reasons NOT to include a word.
Dean: Wow, we really blew it on this one, didn’t we? I’m surprised that I didn’t embrace the word wholeheartedly, because it makes me think of a funny memory from college. During my junior year in France, I led an English conversation group at the American Library in town. One day a guy said: « When I wake up in the morning, I am very angry, and I hit a lot. » The rest of us in the room exchanged worried glances until we realized that he was hungry and ate a lot.
Megan: What is it about “hangry” that you think has caught on?
Erin: In retrospect, I think I underestimated how fun it is to say. It lends itself to exaggeration… »I’m hangggggggry. »
Megan: According to my research the earliest known use of hangry was in 1910. Why do you think the word didn’t take off sooner, or even when I pitched it, and then became so ubiquitous?
Erin: It’s so hard to say—this is absolutely a word that could have been used more in speech and not made it into print (it’s very informal). And the kinds of people who got their writing printed were for a long time the kind of people who almost always had enough to eat, or who weren’t expected to be on diets. So perhaps they just didn’t ever get hangry. The citations in the OED are interesting in that of the five citations; two are about animals, and one is using the word as an example of contraction; only two are about people, and both of those are after 2000.
Megan: What do you think about hangry being added to the OED in 2018?
Erin: I’m all for it! I believe every word deserves a place in the dictionary—the dictionary I work on now, Wordnik, has included ‘hangry’ since at least Sept 2015, according to the Wayback Machine.
Megan: Are there other food words you can remember that you called or didn’t call over the years?
Erin: None spring immediately to mind…
Dean: Well, this would only be a food word for zombies, but Erin once assigned some arcane words to John Linnell to work into a They Might Be Giants song. That’s how he ended up writing « Contrecoup, » which describes a type of brain injury.
Megan: Any thoughts on the next hangry? I.e. what are some food words that are bubbling under the surface now and might take off in 10 or 20 years?
Erin: I saved a citation for “nutritionism” the other day, meaning « the reduction of food to its macro- and micro-nutritional components » (from the always interesting « Second Breakfast » newsletter). I’m also seeing a lot of references to « food noise » (constant intrusive thoughts about food), especially since semaglutide drugs seem to turn them off.
Korean food terms seem to be getting more popular, from dishes such as tteokbokki, ingredients like gochujang, and practices like mukbang videos.
I’m also amused by « batchie » or « batch brew »—coffee brewed in large batches, as opposed to single-serving pour-overs. Everything old is new again…
Megan: Now for the other word I pitched: What do you think today about “breastaurant?” Why hasn’t it taken off?
Erin: I think because it mostly refers to one well-known chain, so…people just would use the name of the chain. 🙂 We do include it in Wordnik, though, and have since 2015, with a number of citations. So I wouldn’t call it a failure, it’s just not a high-frequency word.
Dean: To be honest, while breastaurant did feel like a contender 20+ years ago, I think we’re going to have to wait for the Zeitgeist to come around again on that one.
Anything else you’d like Serious Eats readers to know about your work today?
Erin: I never really liked being the bouncer at the dictionary nightclub…I want to let all the words in to dance! These days I run Wordnik, a nonprofit, online English dictionary where our goal is to include all the words of English—including the 52% of English words that aren’t included in traditional dictionaries. One of the ways people can support the project is by adopting their favorite words—I checked and « hangry » and « breastaurant » are both available. 🙂
Dean: Nowadays I’m a music therapist. And I recently released my debut album! Letters of Transit is at deanolsher.bandcamp.com.
