Merriam-Webster Officially Recognizes 'Dockers' as a Synonym for 'Containers'
One minor change that disrupted a community's ability to constantly correct each other
Despite a hard stance from members of the technical community, Merriam-Webster has officially1 recognized the validity of dockers (short name for Docker containers commonly uttered by amateur tech enthusiasts) as a synonym for containers per their website as of 6:00 AM EST on April 1, 2023.
Self-hoster and homelab enthusiast Raidis Notabackup first spotted the change to the publisher's site early Saturday morning after accidentally clicking a GoogleSearx result while searching for pants with pockets large enough to hold their collection of Linux ISO flash drives:
We attempted to reach out to Merriam-Webster for a comment on the change, but the e-mail was never delivered due to a staff member deciding to self-host it after reading a Reddit comment about how easy it would be for users who aren't concerned about reliability. In the meantime, my neighbor's nephew is an unpaid IT intern for the well-known publisher and shared a lead on additional changes to be implemented on the site in the coming months:
- Removal of the hyphen from "self-hosted"
- Renaming of small form factor NAS machines to "Lil NAS"
- Addendum of the definition for "VPN" to include "Have you tried TailScale?"
- Updated related terms for "smart home" to include "annoyed spouse and kids"
We'll continue updating this article as we receive further information about the change.
1This article was originally published on April 1, 2023. Its contents do not reflect real events or the actual views of the entities mentioned within.
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