It is well known that the concept of the neologism is difficult to define and that the frontiers
of what can and what cannot be considered as a neologism are fuzzy. Despite this general
observation, it is often claimed in the literature that a neologism is characterized by the
absence of or the quest for conventionality. If this is true, we cannot blame dictionaries for
being careful about which neologism out of many others is to be lemmatized. Taking these
facts into consideration, we wish to demonstrate in this article that what dictionaries do
is wait for a neologism to cease to be one, i.e. to acquire semantic and referential stability
which is, in fine, what the processes of denomination do.
CLIL theme: 3147 -- SCIENCES HUMAINES ET SOCIALES, LETTRES -- Lettres et Sciences du langage -- Linguistique, Sciences du langage