By Capri Gahr
Student Reporter
Merriam-Webster dictionaries are now up to date and have added new words for your dictionary reading pleasure. 840 new entries have been added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary.
According to the Merriam-Webster website, words are only added after they have become commonly used by many people.
Words have to become popular in certain cultures and branch out to normal, generic usage to be considered to be added to the dictionary.
Words the have been added include: digital technology words, abbreviated forms of casual speech, borrowed words about food and eating from other cultures, blended words, serious words that are an indication of terms – and recent terms for identities.
Some of these words have recently been added to common vocabulary and people are already familiar with them. Some words are so new that they are not considered words in Microsoft Word.
Here are some of the words that have been added that are some of the dictionary’s favorites, some of which you might have heard and others that you might have not.
1. Wordie, patterned after other words denoting enthusiasts such as foodie and groupie.
2. A demonym names a person who comes from a specific place, like Hoosier or Parisian.
3. Words that come from other places are known as Wanderworts-from the German words meaning “wander” and “word.” It refers to a word borrowed from another language, often as a result of trade or the adoption of newly introduced items or cultural practices
4. Glamping; the activity of enjoying the great outdoors—but with indoor plumbing. It’s a combination of glamorous and camping.
5. Neoadjuvant refers to treatment for a disease or condition that is administered before the primary treatment in order to improve the likelihood of a successful outcome.
6. Bandwidth is now often used figuratively to mean “emotional or mental capacity.”
7. Dumpster fire, used to mean “disaster.”
8. Marg which is short for margarita
9. Generation Z for people born in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
10. Latinx, a gender-neutral alternative to Latina and Latino.
11. TL;DR means “too long; didn’t read” —used to say that something would require too much time to read.
12. A zoodle is a long, thin strip of zucchini that resembles a string or narrow ribbon of pasta.
13. A portmanteau is a word or morpheme whose form and meaning are derived from a blending of two or more distinct forms.
14. A mocktail is a nonalcoholic cocktail.
15. Time suck means an activity to which one devotes a lot of time that might be better or more productively spent doing other things.
Some of these words might look familiar while others seem new and foreign.
The Oxford English Dictionary is regarded as the best dictionary for British English and Webster’s New World dictionary is regarded as the best when it comes to American English. While the Merriam-Webster dictionary received 840 new entries, the
Oxford English Dictionary also received some new entries. Idiocracy is just one of these new entries among 1,400 new words in
Oxford English Dictionary according the Financial Express.
Since the Oxford English Dictionary is British, these words include some similar words as Merriam-Webster and many more that haven’t made it to American usage just yet.
The Merriam-Webster company turns 175 this year.