Sources
Where coinable concepts surface. AI Neologism lives two stages before the dictionary: slang is born in niche communities, amplified by algorithms, described by journalists, studied by academics — and only then codified. We hunt in the middle.
The golden signal: writing that announces a naming gap — “no word for…”, “researchers have noticed a rise in…”, “what we here call…”. Whoever wrote that sentence has verified the phenomenon is real and unnamed.
Tier 2 — Slang watch
The sweet spot: spreading slang with no careful definition anywhere — write the serious entry. Too late: anything in a dictionary's new-word list (it will correctly hit our name-collision gate).
- r/neology
Raw coinages with reasoning; posters often explain the gap they're filling
- r/words
"Is there a word for…" threads — the thread itself is a naming-gap announcement
- Urban Dictionary — newest
Earliest appearances of terms; mostly jokes, but early signals live here
- Know Your Meme
Concept clusters before they solidify into slang; documentation gives ready-made context
- Linguists to follow
Adam Aleksic, #linguistiktok, Lingthusiasm — professionally filtered observations of slang in motion
Ethics: slang often originates in specific communities — name the origin community in the etymology. Attribution is part of the site's honesty.
Tier 3 — Academic sociology
The abstract trick: sociology papers full of documented phenomena with placeholder names — “what we here call ‘ambient precarity’” means real concept, no committed name. You never need to read the whole paper; scan abstracts for those sentences. Always cite the paper as the entry's academic reference.
- SocArXiv / SocOpen
Open social-science preprints (~3,100/yr and growing); browse weekly or follow the feed
- SocOpen essays
Public-facing versions — shorter, plainer language, ideal Coin-with-AI input
- Symbolic Interaction · Social Problems · New Media & Society
Table-of-contents scans; abstracts alone reveal placeholder-label sentences
- Aeon · Psyche
Academics writing publicly about phenomena, often noting the vocabulary gap
- Google Scholar alerts
Alert on "we lack a term for", "as yet unnamed", "no satisfactory term" — researchers flag gaps for you
The weekly 30 minutes
- Harvest (15 min): skim r/neology + Know Your Meme, the SocOpen feed, and your Scholar alerts; park 3–5 links below.
- Coin (10 min): open each seed with “Coin with AI”, pick a candidate, tighten the definition.
- Submit (5 min): send the best 1–3 through verification into the review queue. A steady drip beats a batch.
The full playbook (search recipes, prompt templates, reference mapping) lives in the repository atai-neologism/docs/SOURCING-playbook.md.