Amazeballs: Oxford Dictionaries Adds 50 Cray New Words, Yo!


Yo, wassup! There’s some news out today that’s bound to blow your mind, baller! According to TIME, Oxford Dictionaries just added a bunch of totally cray new words to its online dictionary, including but not limited to cray, hot mess, side boob, hot diggity, spit take, subtweet, catfish, clickbait, listicle, adorbs, amazeballs, baller, SMH, YOLO and FML! Trippy, right!?

Jokes aside, the big reveal occurred on Wednesday, when the editors at Oxford Dictionaries announced their decision to augment their dictionary with 50 new words designed to pay tribute to “popular culture and internet slang.” Technically, however, these new words represent just a “selection of some of the words” to be added, which suggests that more are to added sometime soon.

Regardless, if you find yourself shaking your head in dismay at the seeming deterioration of the English language, have no fear! Time explains that Oxford Dictionaries is simply one “arm of the Oxford family” — the one that “focuses on current English.” It’s much more serious counterpart, the Oxford English Dictionary, will not be adopting any of these new words for now, though BBC News notes that “they could [be added] in the foreseeable future if they continue to be frequently used for years to come.”

The last update happened back in May, when Oxford Dictionaries added words like ship (as in short for relationship), bikeable, sportive, audax, time suck, and snacky. And the update before that one happened in February, when cyberespionage, death stare, food coma, shvitz, and pilcrow were added.

So how do the editors at Oxford Dictionaries discover new words to add? The Telegraph reports that editors comb through a wide range of sources to find words that are slowly but surely gaining traction. Furthermore, according to editor Katherine Connor Martin, they use both U.S. and UK sources:

“… [S]ome new slang and informal words catch on much more quickly in a particular variety of English. For instance, in our monitoring sample, side boob is more than 10 times more common in the UK than in the US, whereas adorbs is used about four times more often in the US as in the UK.”

Basically, the online Oxford Dictionaries serves as a kind of social testing grounds for words. It lets you see what words are gaining traction. There is, however, no guarantee that any word that shows up in Oxford Dictionaries will make it into Oxford English Dictionary.

Image via [Oxford Dictionaries]

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