The Back to the Future films have given us so much.
Just today, we’ve seen a trailer for Jaws 19, inspired by Back to the Future Part II, which also introduced us to Pepsi Perfect, Nikes with self-tightening laces and, yes, hoverboards.
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Now, apparently the Oxford English Dictionary has taken the thirtieth anniversary of Marty McFly’s journeys through time this month to accept “hoverboard” as a real word.
Here’s what the esteemed OED had to say about the decision:
Hoverboards have been in the news a lot in the past year or so—figures from Oxford Dictionaries New Monitor Corpus suggest that after two years of relative silence on the subject of floating skateboards in contemporary written sources, 2014 saw a sudden explosion of interest, and frequency of use is still on the rise.This is no doubt partly due to the fact that this is a special year for fans of the Back to the Future trilogy of films, from the second of which a new OED entry for hoverboard takes its earliest evidence. July saw the thirtieth anniversary of the first film’s release, while next month brings an even more significant date: 21 October 2015, the point in the future to which Marty McFly and Dr. Emmett ‘Doc’ Brown travel in order to save Marty’s kids from themselves in its 1989 sequel, Back to the Future Part II.While some of the technology on show in that film’s futuristic version of Hill Valley’s Courthouse Square is now relatively familiar in our own 2015 (tablet computers, worn technology, and biometric locks), other promised advances (flying cars, domestic fusion generators, and holographic 3D movie advertisements) still seem a long way from everyday reality. The real-life status of perhaps the most iconic and coveted of the film’s gadgets is less clear-cut, however, and the spike on our frequency graphs also reflects the increasing number of reports of hoverboards in the real world over the last few months. But what is a real hoverboard? The prototypes unveiled by Lexus and ArxPax recently clearly satisfy the most important criteria for Back to the Future fans: they hover. Both rely on the repelling power of intense magnetic fields—generated by superconducting magnets cooled by liquid nitrogen—acting on a special magnetized track. So neither holds out the possibility that we’ll all be zooming around towns and cities on them anytime soon. On the other hand, the boards ridden by rapper Wiz Khalifa at Los Angeles airport recently (ridden, that is, until police wrestled him to the ground), and by a pilgrim performing the tawaf in Mecca are hoverboards in name only: the word is currently registered as a trademark in the US and the UK by manufacturers of a miniature, Segway-style, two-wheeled vehicle which stays firmly on the ground. Whether these devices take off (while not actually taking off) remains to be seen; certainly, they haven’t been round long enough to be included in the new OED entry, which restricts itself to boards that Marty McFly would recognize.
A feature-rich 30th anniversary edition of the Back to the Future trilogy is coming to Blu-ray on October 20, along with a documentary about the making of the franchise, the first-ever DVD release of Back to the Future: The Animated Series and a limited theatrical re-release.
