The genesis for the site was the Oxford English Dictionary's Science Fiction Citations Project, begun in 2001.
[2] The Internet Archive had scanned large numbers of science fiction pulp magazines, providing a digital resource that was not available when the earlier project began.
[2] With that resource and the extended period of isolation due to the COVID-19 pandemic,[1] Sheidlower tracked down the original appearance of words such as "mutant",[3] "first contact", and "deep space",[4] and began assembling the new website, launching it live in January, 2021.
The co-editor of the science fiction journal Extrapolation and a professor of English at the University of Georgia, Isaiah Lavender III, notes the usefulness of the dictionary for academic analysis of issues, saying "Having these origin dates in mind can help a student or scholar build a framework to analyze something like the concept of the racial ‘other’ where robots and androids (as well as aliens) are stand-ins for oppressed peoples."
[5] The general criteria for inclusion of a term is that "a word must either be adopted widely within science fiction or become part of the broader culture".