The steady progress of Google, the internet search engine, towards global dominance has an inevitable downside: eventually the American company's name will pass from a trademark, and hence proper noun, to something more commonly used.
That moment, warned against by Google itself, may have come with the announcement by the publishers of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, the US's leading reference book, that its latest edition includes, in addition to the proper noun, the transitive verb to "google", with a lower case g.
Mindful of the trademark, Merriam-Webster maintains the capitalisation in its definition: "to use the Google search engine" to retrieve online information.
Nevertheless the entry gives a hollow ring to Google's own warning about the status of its name, made in its latest "Q-10" filing to the US securities and exchange commission. In the document, used to identify key risks, Google said: "There is a risk that the word 'Google' could become so commonly used that it becomes synonymous with the word 'search'. If this happens, we could lose protection for this trademark, which could result in other people using the word 'Google' to refer to their own products, thus diminishing our brand."
Last month, the Oxford English Dictionary added Google to its pages, as a transitive and intransitive verb, but kept the word capitalised.
Meanwhile the word "google" was included last year in the 4th edition of Australia's Macquarie Dictionary as an intransitive verb, transitive verb and as a noun (as in "I am going to have a google").
The publisher of the Macquarie Dictionary, Susan Butler, told The Age newspaper that the slippage of trademarks into use as common words was a real concern for some companies.
"If you can bring evidence to show that such a word has general currency, then anyone can use it," she said.
She added that Google may have to come up with a simple and easy-to-use replacement and educate people to use that instead.