It worked! Over 1000 postcards were received from every state in the nation as well as from Canada, Chile, China, Germany, India, Ireland, Japan, Korea, Mexico and The United Kingdom. In addition to the postcards, we received persuasive essays written by 6th grade students from Bill Reed Middle School in Loveland, CO, encouraging the addition of the word “chai.” We sent all the postcards and persuasive essays along with about 300 pages of press clippings about chai and Oregon Chai (which we generated) to the Editor of Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary in Boston.

The Editor wrote to us, saying he’d never received such a vast amount of evidence supporting the addition of one word. They added “chai” to the eleventh edition of the Collegiate Dictionary, where it appears on page 204!

To celebrate the news in Oregon Chai’s hometown of Portland, Oregon, we conducted a contest for Portland Public Schools’ 3rd-graders to win a pizza party. Students submitted words they invented, and the winning entry garnered the pizza party for the student’s class, as well as 350 dictionaries which Oregon Chai donated to the schools.