[Ads-l] spawn and spawnkill

[Barretts Mail]

Tolkien used the word “spawn” to refer to Orcs—I believe both as a noun and a verb. Certainly he used it to refer to the descendants of Ungoliant. I would argue that neither the OED nor Merriam-Webster cover this adequately. 

In gaming, the verb “to spawn” is used to refer to character generation. For example, if you have three lives, each time you die, your character is spawned again. This is defined at https://www.dictionary.com/browse/spawn, but not in the OED or Merriam-Webster. 

In games with killing, some people will kill characters the moment they respawn. This is referred to as spawnkilling (and is generally considered inappropriate gameplay). I didn’t find “spawnkill" in any standard reference dictionary other than Wiktionary, which traces the word back to 2002.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/spawnkill#English
https://www.cyberdefinitions.com/definitions/SPAWN-KILL.html
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Spawn kill&page=2 <https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Spawn%20kill&page=2>

Benjamin Barrett (he/his/him)
Formerly of Seattle, WA 
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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org