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The Rock stands as a singular force in WWE history.
A creative power house beyond compare.
Back in early 1998 during a seemingly routine interview
hyping his match against Ken Shamrock at that year's WrestleMania, the great one
uttered a word that would not only change the face of sports entertainment, but
even the English language.
A word that despite its humble beginnings would cement itself into the vernacular.
>> The Rock is gonna save the best for last.
Wrestlemania XIV.
The Rock will lay the smackdown on your monkey ass and
leave Wrestlemania XIV [INAUDIBLE] >> In 2007, that word,
smackdown, was formally recognized by Merriam-Webster, but how?
How did a word that was once used for
trash talk in a wrestling interview wind up in the pages of the dictionary?
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To get a better understanding of smackdown's evolution from catchphrase to
lexiconic heavyweight,
we travel to Merriam-Webster's headquarters to talk to an expert.
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So is this a documentary?
I'm Peter Sokolowski, editor at large at Merriam-Webster.
Smackdown.
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Smackdown, the definition of smackdown as a noun, the act of knocking down or
bringing down an opponent, a contest in entertainment wrestling,
a decisive defeat or a confrontation between rivals or competitors.
Generally, for a word to make it in the dictionary,
it has to meet three criteria and they're very basic criteria.
Has to be used by a lot of people, so frequency of use.
It has to be used in the same meaning by all of those people and
it has to show a kind of sustained use.
Frequent use, meaningful use, sustained use.
>> Smackdown is a compound word.
Compound words are formed when two or
more words are put together to form a new word with a new meaning.
>> An Interesting story with compound words like this,
it's made up of two words smack and down.
There was a traditional prejudice against entering compound words.
So, for example, there's no entry in the dictionary for cattle ranch,
you just you look up cattle, you look up ranch, you can figure out what that means.
There is an entry in the dictionary for dude ranch because you need an explanation
of a place in the country where city people go.
In a case of smackdown, I think It was viewed as a verb to smack down.
It was viewed as self-explanatory.
Smack means hit, and we have that in the dictionary.
And down as an adverb in that case, well, that works with so many verbs, put down,
sit down, throw down, smack down.
So it was decided that it would waste space initially
in the print dictionary when space was very precious.
So that's why it wasn't entered immediately.
And so because smackdown was used in this very specific,
very lexiconically identifiable way, which is to say it was used by a lot of people
in a lot of publications to mean the same thing,
those are the criteria by which we enter any word, any word in English.
So, we added the noun, but not the verb in 2007.
>> Contrary to popular belief, The Rock didn't coin the term smackdown.
The word has been in existence since at least the 1930s, but it took the power of
the great one to awaken it from decades of dormancy to propel it into pop culture.
Let's see, in Newsweek 1950- >> Not in this case.
I'm putting the smackdown on their ass.
>> New terminology evolves from the specific to the general.
So it could be French cuisine.
It could be professional wrestling.
A word that's used by the insiders becomes the words that are used by the fans and
the people who are just learning about it, or just trying at home or
following at home.
So if a very influential person, if the star of the show,
uses the term in mass media, whether that's print or broadcast,
that is an incredibly powerful way to kind of turn the course of vocabulary
to add this word to the vocabulary of many, many people in many, many places.
That's an incredibly powerful thing.
Not many people have that opportunity.
Smackdown has left an indelible mark on language, as we know it, and
we can thank The Rock for that.
But given the utterly unique parlance of sports entertainment-
>> What you gonna do when Hulkamania runs
wild on you?
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>> [SOUND] [SOUND] >> We're gonna have so much fun here!
>> Yowie wowie!
>> What will be the next word to transcend the WWE Universe and
make its way into the dictionary?
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