What Would Your English Teacher Say? : Language: Despite protests from grammarians and educators, hundreds of new words enter our vocabulary every year.

If someone calls you fat, ask how it’s spelled before taking offense. If it’s phat , it’s a compliment, experts on new words say.

“ Phat is a very positive term originally from black English,” said Jesse Sheidlower, an editor of Random House dictionaries. In use since 1963, the word can be used to describe a person (“She’s really phat”) or a situation (“How’s it going?” “Phat.”).

A public forum on neology, the study of new words, recently drew about 125 teachers, poets, reporters and other word lovers to the campus of Case Western Reserve University here.

Dictionary editors explained that they count uses of new words in newspapers, magazines, science journals, computer databases and elsewhere. When a word appears regularly, it is considered for inclusion in new editions of dictionaries.

“If a term appears in the Wall Street Journal and Rolling Stone [magazine], that has more weight than two appearances in one publication,” Sheidlower said.

Karaoke , global warming , quality time , bejeaned (wearing jeans) and dis (to show disrespect for or insult, as in “He was dissing me”) have entered the lexicon, panelists said.

Juries are still out on waitron , a non-gender-specific term for waiter, and on a verb, to O.J. , which may mean to travel at 35 m.p.h. on an expressway but probably more often means to abuse or kill.

Simpson’s widely televised murder trial has contributed criminalist (a forensic investigator) and sidebar (a meeting of defense and prosecuting attorneys and a judge) to new dictionaries.

New words can come from teen-agers, music, science, medicine and society at large.

Moshing is a somewhat violent form of dancing at some rock concerts. Mosh pit , the area where people mosh in front of the stage, made it into this year’s Random House dictionary.

The November, 1995, edition of Webster’s New World Dictionary will include computer terms cyberspace , Internet and WYSIWYG (a computer screen display that shows data exactly as it will appear in printed form, as in, “what you see is what you get”), editor Michael Agnes said.

Terms are often widely used before they appear in dictionaries. Generation X --the sometimes apathetic or materialistic children of baby boomers--was just added.

Business and finance have generated new such words as downsizing and incenting , which means providing an incentive.

English teachers and other language conservatives may be bummed (that means distressed--you could look it up). But panelists said using nouns as verbs, or verbing, should not be disdained.

Grammarians and neologists often disagree, Sidney Landau of Cambridge University Press observed. “Some people feel these are barbarisms--nouns used as verbs,” he said.

But it is the job of dictionaries to provide spellings and meanings of any words that people might need to look up, the editors said. Ballpoint, airlift and government were once radical new words, they said.

“Language reflects our efforts to cope with the world as we have found it,” said Robert Barnhart of Barnhart Books.

“Language simply changes as it has since the beginning of time and will until it’s dead,” Merriam-Webster’s Victoria Neufeldt said.

College edition dictionaries include about 150,000 words. When they are fully revised about every 10 years, thousands of words are added, David Jost of American Heritage Dictionary said.

But it’s risky deleting words as they fade from use.

“The last time around, we took out hodad [someone who hangs around surfers but does not surf],” Jost said. Then editors had to rethink that decision when an online venture used the slogan, “Don’t be a hodad--surf the Internet.”