I have a couple of different shirts that bill me as a booktrovert that I always get compliments on when I wear them. Recently, I was wearing one of them, and someone asked me if it was a real word in the dictionary. I wasn’t in the position to verify immediately but answered, “Probably not.”
It struck me at the time that it is a great example of how editors handle words that an author may have invented or that is common slang that hasn’t made its way to the dictionary yet, and those are some of my favorite projects to work on as an editor. They’re fun precisely because they aren’t in the dictionary! But that doesn’t mean there still isn’t a process for deciding the best way to format them. So, in the same way, I walked you through the debate on Kyiv and Kiev a couple of months ago, I will walk you through how I handle words like booktrovert as an editor.
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