JK Rowling shows touch of magic as 'muggle' makes dictionary

HARRY Potter has already cast his spell over millions of readers and now the schoolboy wizard has conjured his way into the language.

The word ‘muggle’ is to appear in a major dictionary for the first time. Coined by JK Rowling, it means a person who cannot practise magic. But it has been extended to anyone who is clumsy and unable to master a skill such as computing.

The 37-year-old author, who is expecting her second child, is working on her fifth book, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

Muggle will appear in the authoritative Oxford English Dictionary. The reference book is being updated for only the third time in its 146-year history.

An entry for a living author of fiction is extremely rare. Yesterday a spokeswoman for the OED said the "worldwide popularity of JK Rowling’s fiction" had led to its speedy inclusion.

"We would only tend to include fictional creatures when they have acquired some sort of extended use. What is interesting about muggle, and what made it get published so quickly, was that it normally takes some time before the word starts to be used outside of its fictional context, but with muggle this seemed to happen quite quickly.

The OED gathers evidence of English usage from a wide variety of texts in its bid to find new words or usages.

"If a word is used consistently over a period of at least five years, it becomes a candidate for drafting with a view to inclusion in OED Third Edition," said the spokeswoman.

"Muggle was one such word. The worldwide popularity of Rowling’s fiction led to the word gaining a wide currency with English users throughout the world.

"Furthermore, the fact it had started to occur in contexts outside those of Rowling’s fictional world, in allusive or extended uses especially in the field of computing where it is used to refer to a person who has little or no knowledge of computer programming, meant that it was considered to be established enough in the English language to justify inclusion in the OED."

The OED, which was first published in 1857, is undergoing a 34m update. New entries for the Third Edition, which will contain over 400,000 definitions, are being published on the internet first.

The entry reads: "Muggle n. In the fiction of JK Rowling: a person who possesses no magical powers. Hence in allusive and extended uses: a person who lacks a particular skill or skills, or who is regarded as inferior in some way."

Other authors such as JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis have had to make do with posthumous recognition ; hobbit and jabberwock were not included in the OED until 1976.