Good news for language lovers and queer people alike: everyone’s go-to online dictionary just updated their database with hundreds of new and popular terms, including some straight from the lips of LGBTQ+ communities.
This week, Dictionary.com rolled out its winter 2023 update, including over 1,500 new and revised entries reflecting how people around the world are using the English language.
More than 300 of the entries are new, including one word that’s had many buzzing for the past couple of years: “queerbaiting,” which the site now defines as “a marketing technique involving intentional homoeroticism or suggestions of LGBTQ+ themes intended to draw in an LGBTQ+ audience, without explicit inclusion of openly LGBTQ+ relationships, characters, or people.” Read: Leave random celebrities alone.
The update also includes updated usage of the term “pinkwashing,” which has long been used to describe profiteering from breast cancer awareness but has also come to refer to “acknowledging and promoting the civil liberties of the LGBTQ+ community [...] as a ploy to divert attention” from other activities that work against LGBTQ+ people’s interests.
The site’s editors also reworked their definition of “sex,” a word which has become a battleground for conservatives opposed to both transgender rights and gay marriage. The new definition clarifies that while sex is usually framed as a male-female binary based on egg and sperm production, “the way that a person's sex is categorized depends on several characteristics,” including “genitals, chromosomes, hormonal profiles, and external physical features,” and is not necessarily connected to a person’s gender identity. That knowledge is ever more essential as anti-trans legislation increasingly targets intersex rights and autonomy as well.
“Language is, as always, constantly changing, but the sheer range and volume of vocabulary captured in our latest update to Dictionary.com reflects a shared feeling that change today is happening faster and more than ever before,” said John Kelly, senior director of editorial at Dictionary.com, in a press release Tuesday. “Our team of lexicographers is documenting and contextualizing that unstoppable swirl of the English language — not only to help us better understand our changing times, but how the times we live in change, in turn, our language.”
Other new and updated words in the site’s first update of 2023 include “abrosexual” (denoting a fluid or changing sexual orientation), “multisexual” (an attraction to multiple genders, overlapping with bisexual and pansexual), and “woke,” which editors note has been corrupted to refer to liberal or progressive positions or policies in a generally disparaging sense.
While we’re big fans of many of these updates, including the expanded selection of bread-related terminology, easily the best note you’ll find is in reference to “grundle,” yet another term for the perineum following on the heels of “gooch” and the ever-classic “taint.”
“Alas, our noble lexicographers follow the language wherever it takes them,” write the editors. We salute your brave, valuable, and sometimes ridiculous work, sweet word nerds. Etymology forever!
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