The Vocabulary We Brought With Us: A Lexical Census of HCI 2009's Abstracts
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Archives are usually read for their arguments. They can also be read for their vocabulary. The abstract booklet for HCI 2009 is, among other things, a word list: a record of which nouns a UK-centred research community reached for when it described its work, and which ones it had not yet adopted. This article reports a small lexical census of that material, carried out as an exercise in archival reading rather than as a bibliometric study.
Counting words, and counting carefully
The method was deliberately simple, so that any reader with access to the booklet can repeat it. Paper titles and abstracts were transcribed, references and author affiliations were set aside, plurals and hyphenation were normalised, and the remaining text was tallied by recurring term. The aim was not statistical precision but pattern recognition: which words carry the weight, which words cluster together, and which words are conspicuously thin on the ground.
The limits should be stated at the outset. Abstract lengths vary considerably between tracks; workshop and poster entries are shorter than full papers; and any tally depends on decisions about stemming and synonymy. Words such as 'interface' and 'interaction' appear in compound forms that a stricter count would split. The figures below are therefore indicative, offered as a reading of emphasis rather than a definitive index.
The load-bearing nouns
Three families of terms dominate the material. The first is usability, often paired with evaluation, testing or inspection. It appears in titles, in method sections and in the framing sentences that establish why a study matters. The second is user-centred design, frequently hyphenated and frequently spelled out in full, which functions as a statement of methodological allegiance as much as a description of practice. The third is interaction itself, used both as a general noun and in compounds: interaction design, human-computer interaction, social interaction, tangible interaction.
Around these sit the supporting terms of an empirical field. Evaluation is pervasive. Prototype, task, interface, participant and study recur with the regularity of a shared grammar. Ergonomics persists, though more often at the edges of the programme than at its centre, and CSCW appears as a marker of a neighbouring community whose concerns overlap without being identical.
What is striking, reading in sequence, is how confidently the vocabulary of method is used. The field in 2009 knew how to describe what it did: it built things, tested them with people, and reported the results. The uncertainty lay elsewhere, in the naming of the overall enterprise.
The absent vocabulary
The most revealing findings are negative. The abbreviation 'UX' is effectively absent. 'User experience' does occur, but rarely, and usually spelled out in full rather than compressed into a brand. Terms that would become commonplace in the following decade are either missing or marginal: service design, design system, research operations, design thinking as a named approach. Accessibility is present, but framed largely through assistive technology and compliance rather than through the wider language of inclusive design that later became standard.
This absence should not be read as a failure. It is a description of a particular moment. The vocabulary of 2009 reflects a field that had consolidated its methods before it had consolidated its marketing. The words that were missing are, in effect, the words that had not yet been needed.
Titles as a grammar of ambition
Title patterns tell a similar story. The dominant forms are hedged and incremental: 'Towards...', 'Supporting...', 'Exploring...', 'A study of...', 'An investigation into...'. These are the titles of a community that values careful empirical work over sweeping claims. Compare the titles that circulate in 2026, where 'rethinking', 'lessons from' and 'at scale' do considerable rhetorical work. The ambition has not necessarily changed, but its syntax has.
From 2009 to 2026: same work, different labels
The vocabulary of HCI 2009 has not disappeared. It survives in standards, in methods chapters, in the language of evaluation that UK practitioners still use when they explain a study to a client. What has changed is the layer of shorthand above it. A researcher in 2026 may describe the same activity as discovery research, usability testing or UX evaluation, depending on audience and context. The underlying nouns, participant, task, prototype, remain recognisably those of 2009.
For UK readers, this continuity is worth noting. The institutional landscape has shifted: the balance between academic groups, consultancies and in-house teams is different, and the professional bodies that once hosted these conversations have changed their emphasis. But the lexical core has proved durable. The words that were absent in 2009 were largely absorbed later, often from commercial practice, and often without displacing the older terms.
What the census cannot settle
A word count cannot tell us why a term was chosen, only that it was. It cannot distinguish between a deliberate rejection of 'UX' and simple habit. Nor can it account for the conversations in the corridors, where vocabulary is negotiated more quickly than in print. Those limits are real, and they are the reason this kind of audit belongs alongside oral history and marginalia rather than in place of them.
What the census can do is make the field's self-description visible. It shows a community that knew its methods, named its methods, and had not yet settled on a shorthand for its purpose. That is a useful thing to have on record, particularly now, when the shorthand is everywhere and the methods it stands for are sometimes taken for granted.
