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Back in 1998, bookstores in English-speaking Canada suddenly looked like their counterparts in France, with their windows and floor displays dominated not by novels or popular nonfiction but by dictionaries. More precisely, piles of the first edition of the Canadian Oxford Dictionary.

Katherine Barber, Who Defined Canadian English, Is Dead at 61]

When the article appeared online, it provoked a lot of Twitter conversation about Canadianisms, particularly over the correct term for underwear. In the first sentence of the obituary, I went with “gotchies,” which the first edition of the dictionary casts as the “diminutive of GOTCH.”

But many people had other ideas, including: ginch, gonch, ginches, gitch, gitchies and gaunch. (Forgive me if I missed some.)

Judy Gombita, a Torontonian who favors “gotchies,” finally offered this analysis: “So the word definitely BEGINS with a G and often ends with CH, but the in-between varies widely across English Canada’s regions.”

Letterkenny,” the streaming comedy series set in a fictional southern Ontario town, has taken that to new heights. While some of the (printable) terms used by its characters are standard hockey slang or Canadian English, like laneway and rez (for reserve), its writers have gone on to create their own fictional dialect.

article from Babble, an online language learning company, makes a compelling case that the fictional speech in Letterkenny is a “conlang” or constructed language like Newspeak in George Orwell’s “1984” or Nadsat, the mix of Russian and English that Anthony Burgess created for “A Clockwork Orange.”

As I wrote in Ms. Barber’s obituary, declining sales of print dictionaries mean that the Canadian Oxford has not been updated since its second edition was published in 2004.

Some, apparently younger, Twitter users posted that they had never heard some of the Canadianisms I included in the obituary. And while new Canadianisms have likely come along over the last 17 years, the fluidity of languages means that many others have just as probably fallen into obscurity. When I was growing up, the largest piece of furniture in my parents’ room that was devoted to sitting was the chesterfield. Its counterpart in my household is now getting new slip covers and no one has called it anything other than a sofa or a couch during the process.

There has been one update of sorts, however. Among the many sources Ms. Barber and her crew drew on was the Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles, which was published in 1967. It was a very different creature than the Canadian Oxford. Intended for scholars, it was essentially a collection of Canadian words going back to the arrival of English speakers in what became Canada rather than a general reference dictionary and a snapshot of Canadian English use, spelling and pronunciations at that time.