The Oxford English Dictionary's public site publishes word additions, language history, and notes on usage such as singular they.
HN links its new-word lists when discussing how English changes, and its subscription page when people complain about OED access and the lack of an app.
> It is a bound.
Yeah, that seems like a good way to think of it.
> Shakespeare is often credited with inventing huge numbers of words, but it is more likely that he was just the first to get them into print, in a form that survived.
That might be less true than someone might guess today. From ~1475, when the printing press arrived in the British Isles, through Shakespeare's time and until Samuel Johnson's dictionary of ~1755, is called the Early Modern period in English. During it was also the Reformation of the 16th century and the growth of science in the 17th century, and London's population doubling multiple times.
Before that, Middle English was a backwater, a limited language not respected even in its own country. "Early in the period, English was frequently compared unfavourably as a literary language with Latin. It was also initially seen as not possessing advantages over other European language ...". [0]
But early in Shakespeare's career: " ... there was a sudden change between 1570 and 1580. English began to be praised, in contrast with other languages, for its copious vocabulary, linguistic economy (in using words of mainly one or two syllables), and simple grammar." [0]
"The vocabulary of English expanded greatly during the early modern period. Writers were well aware of this and argued about it. Some were in favour of loanwords to express new concepts, especially from Latin. Others advocated the use of existing English words, or new compounds of them, for…
Either you come from somewhere with extraordinarily talented elementary school students, or you are confusing the OED with a different similarly named work, perhaps the something from here https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/?
The OED that's being referred to here is a 20+ volume set that costs about a thousand dollars: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-oxford-english-dictionary-9780198611868?cc=us&lang=en. University libraries will probably have a copy or two, and I suppose some high school (9th-12th grade) libraries might have a single rarely consulted set, but I'm doubtful any elementary schools in the US have one.
The best evidence I can give for its exclusiveness might be the link on the front page of the official OED site http://www.oed.com to the information about the print edition: http://public.oed.com/about/the-oed-in-print-and-on-cd-rom/. It goes to a page not found. Rather than being a standard companion book, apparently so few copies of this are sold that no one has bothered to fix the broken link!
For full feature 'traditional' English the custodians are the Oxford English Dictionary and the BBC. Every once in a while, and with great fanfare, the BBC announce what new words have been deemed appropriate to add to the language.
The OED have an archive of these updates for more recent times online. Not so long ago they would make you buy the actual dictionary to get this information so these 'updates' do not go that far back in time. Words have to be hoarded and protected, can't let anyone have them...
https://public.oed.com/updates/
I believe Merriam-Webster had something to do with this rival 'simplified' English that has been popular across the pond since some incident involving tea in Boston. The real deal is obviously spelt out in the Oxford English Dictionary.
EDIT: Look at OED's additions list from June 2015, specifically under 'g': http://public.oed.com/the-oed-today/recent-updates-to-the-oed/june-2015-update/new-words-list-june-2015/
'gunna'. Is it still wrong?
--original comment--
Common usage does eventually lead to validity, though. Language is not static and evolves through usage. Besides, how are you going to measure validity? Is the OED the sole arbiter of what's "correct"? Common usage and mutual understanding is a great way to determine what's "correct" in a language.
I won't debate the legal usage of the word, as there was no mention of legal interpretation by the courts in the previous comments. However you are correct from a legal perspective where words have specific meanings.
> "They" implies multiple
No.
It doesn't.
The Oxford English Dictionary traces singular they back to 1375, where it appears in the medieval romance William and the Werewolf
The New Oxford Dictionary of English (1998) not only accepts singular they, they also use the form in their definitions.
And the New Oxford American Dictionary (Third Edition, 2010), calls singular they ‘generally accepted’ with indefinites, and ‘now common but less widely accepted’ with definite nouns, especially in formal contexts.
https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they/
Please, learn English.
Language changes slowly but constantly: words evolve new sentences, new phrases are coined, others become less current. The OED is so big that the only practical way to revise it is continuously, a few entries at a time. Every quarter there are hundreds of changes: https://public.oed.com/updates/ . As with software, it turns out that financing a product that needs continuous updates is more effectively done with a subscription than by selling products as one-off transactions. (FWIW the print version of the 2nd edition OED is 20 volumes and is listed on the OED site at 860 quid.)