‘Dungeon Crawler’ Officially Enters The Lexicon, Now Your RPG Adventures Are Linguistically Correct
Merriam-Webster added some 200 words to its dictionary this week, including one that many RPG players know well: Dungeon Crawler.
“Words have meaning” is a phrase often shouted in frustration, usually at the comments section of whatever is on your nearest screen. But it’s one that, on rare occasions, celebrates language in all its fluid, nonconforming grace. Such is the case this week, when Merriam-Webster announced that it would be adding 200 new words and definitions to its dictionary.
Language is ever-changing and ever-growing, and the new words reflect our modern times, with phrases like “For You Page” and “Street Corn.” But nestled among the new words is one that’s been around for a while—at least since 1974: “Dungeon Crawler.”
Though weirdly enough, they get it wrong.
Dungeon Crawler’s Definition Walks Past Its Origins Like Adventurers Past A Secret Door
But first, let me type a phrase that every single freshman knows deep in their mitochondrial memory:
Merriam-Webster defines a dungeon crawler as “a video game where the gameplay is primarily focused on defeating enemies while exploring a usually randomly generated labyrinthine or dungeon-like environment.” And if you’ve ever played a D&D adventure, you might be thinking, “That sounds like what we do.”
If you were thinking that, you would be more right than you know. D&D is the reason that dungeon crawler video games (and boss fights while we’re at it) exist in the first place, hearkening back to games like pedit5 and dnd whose creators played D&D and translated that experience to games installed on university mainframes in secret, so administrators wouldn’t delete them.
“Within 21 months of the publication of the D&D rule book, the game of dnd based on it had reached version 2.8, and a counter of the number of dungeon trips by all players since the game’s creation (or, at least, since the counter was initialized) was fast approaching the 100,000th trip.“
– Dirk Pellet, author of dnd.
Even the “first known use” puts the origins of dungeon crawler in 1989 – 15 years after the first publications of D&D. But, maybe there’s room for “dungeon crawl” alongside dungeon crawler in that dictionary.
Whatever the case, know that the next time you describe your campaign as a gritty dungeon crawler (not to be confused with a Gritty dungeon crawler), you’ve got a dictionary to back you up.
