Merriam-Webster Officially Recognizes 'Dockers' as a Synonym for 'Containers'

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.