Categorizing obsolete, archaic, and classic words in an Indonesian dictionary

Abstract

The global era has led to fairly rapid changes in language. Many words have become obsolete. There are also many words whose meanings have become irrelevant nowadays. Unfortunately, in Indonesian dictionaries, especially in the Kamus Besar Bahasa Indonesia (KBBI; Comprehensive dictionary of Indonesian), there is no label for obsolete words. There is only an “archaic” label to mark all outdated words and a “classic” label to mark classical words. Another labeling problem in the KBBI is that there are no clear guidelines or criteria to determine when a word is considered archaic, obsolete, or classic. The absence of clear criteria causes some entries that have been labeled “archaic” in the KBBI to seem obsolete, and sometimes words labeled as classic get confused with archaic words. The aim of this article is to investigate ways of categorizing archaic, obsolete, and classic words in the KBBI. This research was conducted by comparing several forms and entry criteria labeled “archaic,” “obsolete,” and “classic” in several dictionaries, in particular dictionaries of foreign languages whose lexicographic traditions are well established. Each dictionary has its own criteria for classifying a word as archaic, obsolete, or classic, and we can learn from them. The findings suggest that checking the corpus data set is the easiest way to categorize words according to their labels.