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More than 500 new words have been added to www.dictionary.com this week.
Phrases from different cultures, countries and generations, words that originated online, and terms that were once the province of certain industries like tech, wellness and finance, have been added to the mainstream lexicon, proving how far and fast language moves these days.
Familiar terms like biohacking and intermittent fasting have been included, as have lesser known words such as bloatware and unsee, along with an array of downright obscure references: Orange shower, anyone?
And for anyone who has ever sent a text they regret, unsend has also been legitimised.
Here are some of the most fun and interesting words added to the dictionary.
Nepo baby enters the mainstream
Actress Lily-Rose Depp, the daughter of Johnny Depp and Vanessa Paradis, is a nepo baby. Reuters
Among the words making the biggest headlines for their debut in the dictionary, nepo baby sits at the top.
The term was coined by X user Meriem Derradji in early 2022. After watching TV show Euphoria, Derradji tweeted her astonishment that one of its stars, Maude Apatow, was the daughter of writer-director Judd Apatow and actress Leslie Mann, dubbing her a “nepo baby”.
The term was quickly picked up by Gen Z as they discovered that some of their favourite stars were the offspring of other celebrities.
The phrase was then cemented in pop culture when New York magazine ran a cover story featuring Dakota Johnson, Jack Quaid, Lily-Rose Depp, Zoe Kravitz and more, under the headline: “She has her mother’s eyes. And her agent.”
While Eve Hewson, actress and daughter of U2 frontman Bono claimed the term was driven by “jealousy”, Girls actress Allison Williams, daughter of US newsreader Brian Williams, owned her privilege, telling Vulture: “To not acknowledge that me getting started as an actress versus someone with zero connections isn’t the same – it’s ludicrous.”
New words in tech, social media and money
The fast pace of today’s technology has seen many words in the tech sphere enter the everyday lexicon. Digital nomad makes its debut in reference to the post-pandemic rise in people working from anywhere around the world, as does algo, short for algorithm and bloatware, the term used to describe unwanted software that is preinstalled on new devices.
Pessimise was introduced as the opposite of optimise, referring to technology that is created to become less efficient over time, forcing users to buy new ones.
Chatbot and GPT (generative pre-trained) were also included in the wake of the headline-making technology ChatGPT, along with the concerning verb hallucinate that describes when a machine-learning programme, such as AI, “produces false information contrary to the intent of the user and presents it as if true and factual.”
Big pharma collectivises the power and influence held by the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, albeit with negative connotations, while information pollution gives a name to the dilution or suppression of facts by way of irrelevance, bias and sensationalism.
New pop culture slang
Orange shower has been included in the dictionary, meaning to eat an orange in the shower. Unsplash / Chang Duong
Two sections, slang and pop culture, had the largest increase of words. Unsee and unsend entered the mainstrea – having both often been used in social media and text messaging parlance for years to refer to things you wish you hadn't seen or sent.
Work to rule refers to the Gen Z-driven approach to employment of never going above or beyond what the job description entails, while jawn moves beyond the borders of Philadelphia - where it has long referred to something you don't know the name of - to the rest of the world. Example: "Hey, can you hand me that jawn over there.”
Niche additions include orange shower, the act of unpeeling an orange in the shower. The term first appeared in a thread on social media platform Reddit in 2016, with the idea being that the steam from the shower and the unpeeled orange combined to create a soothing citrus shower experience.
An even more esoteric choice is agelast, referring to someone who never laughs, while sonder is the word for the realisation that you are merely a minor or secondary character in the lives of others.
Health, happiness and the environment
Kylie Jenner has often been branded a climate criminal, due to the number of private jet trips she takes. AFP
Biohacking, in which people attempt to find (and then post on social media) shortcuts to optimum health was introduced among the new words, along with intermittent fasting, which has become a popular method for weightloss.
Decision fatigue makes its debut as a modern lament usually associated with the overabundance of choice on streamers making it difficult to decide what to watch.
Environmental words include greenwashing, “the practice of promoting or affiliating a brand, campaign, mission, etc, with environmentalism as a ploy to divert attention from policies and activities that are in fact anti-environmentalist.”
Reality TV star and beauty mogul Kylie Jenner will be familiar with the inclusion of climate criminal as she was branded one for the number of private jet trips she takes, with the phrase referring to people “whose actions or activities are considered particularly destructive to the environment.”
In the autumn of 2003, Japan was having a bit of a moment at the movies. That October, cinema audiences were treated to the spectacle of Uma Thurman clashing with the Crazy 88 yakuza gang in Quentin Tarantino’s “Kill Bill: Vol. 1.” A few weeks later, Tom Cruise could be seen getting in touch with his warrior spirit in Edward Zwick’s period epic, “The Last Samurai.”
But first out of the blocks was “Lost in Translation,” the sophomore feature by Sofia Coppola — a celebrity kid already well on her way to becoming a celebrated filmmaker in her own right.
Released in U.S. theaters on Sept. 12, this tale of a brief encounter between two lonely souls at a luxury hotel in Tokyo was a resounding critical and commercial success. Produced on a modest $4 million budget, it went on to pick up four Academy Award nominations, including for best picture, with Coppola taking home the Oscar for best original screenplay.
The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes who Created the Oxford English Dictionary is a celebration of words and word-people: authors, editors, publishers, linguists, lexicographers, philologists, obsessives, pedants. Its author, Sarah Ogilvie, was formerly an Oxford English Dictionary editor and wrote the 2013 book Words of the World: A Global History of the Oxford English Dictionary.
Review: The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes who Created the Oxford English Dictionary (Chatto & Windus)
Ogilvie’s focus in The Dictionary People is on editor James Augustus Henry Murray (1837-1915), who orchestrated a collective, pre-digital mode of crowd-sourcing to produce the first edition of the dictionary.
An unlikely lexical prodigy, Murray had left school at 14. He had worked on a dairy farm, then as a teacher and a bank clerk. In between those and other jobs, he developed a broad knowledge of foreign languages – including Tongan and classical Greek – and became a serious student of etymology and philology. On that basis he was enlisted to help with the dictionary.
For his work, Murray built a large iron shed in his garden that was called, grandly, “the Scriptorium”. On cold days, which were many, Murray’s editorial assistants would wrap their legs in newspaper to stay warm.
Lacking a university education, Murray was alert to status and perceptions. He gifted himself the names “Augustus” and “Henry” to impart gravity and distinction to his otherwise humble-sounding name. After he was awarded an honorary degree from the University of Edinburgh in 1874, he wore his scholar’s cap every day.
Murray’s OED was to be much more than a list of words and their definitions. It would also be a philological document, providing examples of how words had appeared in books and newspapers. That goal was well beyond the capacity of an editor and a small team of shivering assistants. Hence the crowd-sourcing. A vast network of people would join the project, sending in paper slips showing examples of English words in context.
There were so many contributors sending so many slips that the Royal Mail installed a red pillar box outside Murray’s home. Many of the contributors (nearly 500) were women, and some of those were among the OED’s super-contributors, sending in thousands of slips over many years.
When it was finally published in 1928 after Murray’s death, his edition of the OED contained 414,825 entries, with 1.8 million illustrative quotations.
Allusions and anecdotes
The catalyst for The Dictionary People was Ogilvie’s rediscovery of Murray’s ribbon-tied address books in a “dusty box” in the basement archive of Oxford University Press.
The address books revealed an extraordinary collection of contributors, including Virginia Woolf’s father Leslie Stephen, Karl Marx’s daughter Eleanor, the American army surgeon William Chester Minor, and Sir John Richardson, surgeon and naturalist on John Franklin’s first voyage in search of the Northwest Passage.
William Chester Minor (1834-1920).Public domain
Like Murray’s OED, The Dictionary People is a collective exercise. In addition to other supporters and sources, Ogilvie has assembled the book with the assistance of ten student researchers at Stanford University, with an eye for fascinating allusions and anecdotes.
We learn from The Dictionary People that Jane Austen was the first to write the word “outsider” and that a cousin of Eleanor Marx hallucinated that she had written Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women.
We also learn that the OED entry for ruffle – “to rumple, to destroy the smoothness or evenness of something” – took an illustrative quotation from Eleanor’s 1886 translation of Madame Bovary, and that, at the age of 27, a not-yet-famous J.R.R. Tolkien worked on the OED as an editorial assistant with the lexicographer Charles Onions, whose family referred to Tolkien as “Jirt”, short for J.R.R.T.
Yet another delightful detail: 18 words from the science-fiction novella Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884), including “dimensionable” and “nondimensionable”, made it in to the dictionary. Written by mathematician and theologian Edwin Abbott Abbott under the pseudonym “A. Square”, Flatland is the story of a square who visits Pointland, Lineland and Spaceland “to explore the possibility of other dimensions”.
A book with Austen, Woolf, Tolkien and sci-fi? The Dictionary People is irresistible.
Read more: Youse wouldn't believe it: a new book charts the 11-year making of a 'people's dictionary' for Australia
Public domain
Gonzoesque
The Dictionary People is a good example of a newish genre of gonzoesque bibliographic history. Other examples include Denis Duncan’s equally excellent Index: A History of the (2022), Emma Smith’s Portable Magic (2022) and my book The Library: A Catalogue of Wonders (2017).
This genre aims to tackle potentially dry, bookish topics in an engaging way. It analyses serious subjects diligently but informally, blending high and low culture, respectable and disreputable content.
Compared to Duncan, Ogilvie is more relaxed with the informality and the edgy terrain. The Dictionary People lacks rock’n’roll, but there is plenty of sex and drugs. Ogilvie devotes a chapter to the erotomaniac Henry Spencer Ashbee, whom Duncan left out of his book, despite the lurid splendour of the index to Ashbee’s anonymously published erotic memoir My Secret Life (1888).
Some parts of The Dictionary People are possibly too gonzoesque, even for me – such as when William Minor takes a paper-knife and a tourniquet and cuts off his own penis.
Eleanor Marx, daughter of Karl Marx (1913)Public domain
In the midst of this symphony of words and colour, there are inevitably some wrong notes. To bring Murray’s list of contributors to life, Ogilvie has assembled a series of biographical portraits. These provide the book with its structure and narrative drama, but some of the biographical entries are stronger than others.
Towards the start of The Dictionary People, Ogilvie confesses to being “thrilled” that the list of OED contributors includes “not one but three murderers, a pornography collector [and] a cocaine addict found dead in a railway station lavatory”.
The addict is Eustace Frederick Bright, the focus of Chapter J. Unfortunately, it is one of the weaker chapters in The Dictionary People. Parts of it read like a Tinder profile, or perhaps the formulaic obituary of the died-young Oxbridge scholar. “Bright by name and bright by nature”, Eustace was
a top student […] passing all his examinations with flying colours […] A good-looking young man, he had an engaging and outgoing personality, and many friends.
There are some unhelpful speculations, such as “if heroin had existed in Bright’s day […] he probably would have tried it”. We learn that Bright died after drinking a phial of liquid cocaine, then taking several tablets, along with morphine. “He began to vomit, then collapsed and, lying on the toilet floor, he died.”
Ogilvie speculates about Murray’s reaction to Bright’s death:
Murray, as a teetotaller, would have been shocked and saddened by the demise of one of his most promising students and volunteers. News of Bright’s overdose came at a difficult time for him. Life in the Scriptorium was particularly stressful […] because of the successful publication [in America] of the Century Dictionary and the generously funded progress of […] Funk and Wagnall’s Standard Dictionary of the English Language.
The chapter towards the end on Chris Collier, however, is one of the strongest: a highlight of the book. Collier was a naturist from Brisbane who, like Murray, left school at 14. He began contributing to the OED in the 1970s, sending 100,000 slips over a period of 35 years.
For his contributions, Collier pulled numerous quotes from the Courier Mail. He sent bundles of slips “eccentrically wrapped in old Corn Flakes packets with pieces of cereal and dog hair stuck to them”. As a result, Brisbane’s main newspaper is proportionally over-represented in the OED.
Ogilvie describes meeting Collier in a Brisbane park in 2006, when Collier was around 70 years old. Dressed Don Dunstan-style in a t-shirt and “very short shorts”, he was reading – of course – the Courier Mail.
James Murray’s edition of the OED contained 414,825 entries and 1.8 million illustrative quotations.Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA
Ogilvie refers regularly to “word nerds”. She is a natural connoisseur, who delights in words such as fritillaria (a type of flowering plant), eweleaze (an upland pasture for feeding sheep), absquatulate (to leave abruptly), apheliotropic and apogeotropic (botanical terms for plants that, respectively, turn away from the sun and bend away from the earth), agamogenetic (asexual reproduction), zoopraxiscope and zoogyroscope (two early forms of movie projector), aophiolaters (people who worship snakes), and cephaleonomancy (“divination by placing a donkey’s head on coals, and watching the jaws move at the name of a guilty person”).
But Ogilvie (or her editor) is not a textbook word nerd. She suggests, for example, that the New Zealand katipo and the Australian redback are the same species of spider; though related, they are not. And do we really need to be told that “non-conformably” means “in a manner that is not conformable”?
Writing about Eustace Bright, Ogilvie remarks that the word junkie “seems the closest adjective beginning with j to describe Murray’s former student”. Rather than “adjective” here, a more punctilious word nerd would have said “word” or “noun”.
Read more: Giving back to English: how Nigerian words made it into the Oxford English Dictionary
The bigger picture
The overarching claim of The Dictionary People is that it shines a light on the “unacknowledged” and “unsung heroes” of the OED. The claim is made in the subtitle and repeated throughout the book. Ogilvie states that she has “uncovered lives that have not necessarily been written about in the history books”.
I’m not sure what Ogilvie means by “necessarily” here, but the claim of unsungness is doubtful. Other works have covered similar ground. Quite a few of the people profiled in the book have been written about extensively. Simon Winchester’s bestselling The Surgeon of Crowthorne (1998), for example, focused on William Chester Minor and was turned into a (not very successful) Hollywood film with Mel Gibson and Sean Penn.
Many books have been written on the search for the Northwest Passage and John Franklin. There are numerous biographies of Leslie Stephen, J.R.R. Tolkien and the Marxes. OED contributor Edward Sugden was profiled in a book by his daughter, as well as in the Australian Dictionary of Biography and the centenary history of Melbourne University Publishing. Henry Spencer Ashbee is the subject of Ian Gibson’s book The Erotomaniac (2001). Ogilvie’s previous book covers some of the same ground as The Dictionary People (it contains the Jirt anecdote, for example) and she wrote about Chris Collier for the Australian Book Review in June 2012.
Henry Spencer Ashbee (1834-1900).Public domain
I think Ogilvie would agree that the “unsung” claim is in many instances an unnecessary overstatement. Her main contribution with The Dictionary People is to put all the biographical portraits together to reveal a new and bigger picture.
What does this bigger picture reveal? In a compelling way, Ogilvie’s mosaic of contributors disrupts the assumptions we make when we see a copy of the OED. She tends to write from a British perspective, but she highlights that other countries and cultures have strong stakes in the OED. She describes how the dictionary was an English project and a British project, but also an empire project and a global project.
The OED was not solely an English enterprise in another sense, too. In the field of dictionary production, as Ogilvie shows, continental Europeans had the jump on England, producing dictionaries with similar methods and ambitions. Murray and other OED editors took a lot from European (and American) precedents and competitors.
What else can we see anew by grouping the contributors together? Murray’s OED was ostensibly a conservative academic project, but it was also a radical and democratic one. It contains countless neologisms. It drew input from people of all genders and classes. Many of the contributors lived far outside the academy, on the margins and fringes of Victorian and Edwardian society. A significant proportion were probably neurodiverse, and a large number were politically, socially and sexually diverse.
Ogilvie’s bigger picture reveals that the English language is not owned by a club or a committee or a university or by people from a particular social class or place. It is a global language in its sources, its reach and its ownership. The language, and the literary and scholarly traditions that were built with it, belong to all of us.
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Dictionary.com has unveiled its fall word drop, which consists of 566 new entries. Alongside ‘nepo baby’ and ‘jawn’, ‘shower orange,’ ‘greenwashing,’ ‘unsend’ and ‘generative AI’ have all landed in the archive.
“The words don’t stop coming, so we’re updating the dictionary more frequently than ever… and just with any words: this update includes an incredibly useful concentration of terms for naming the complexities of modern life,” Dictionary.com shared in a post on X. “We can’t endorse any words, but we can document their use in the real world.”
On the official website, Dictionary.com lists four main inspirations for this season’s additions:
Complicated technical jargon that artificial intelligence has catapulted into our awareness
Intriguing loanwords from languages around the world
Fun insta-adds to your vocabulary for things you didn’t know there were words for
And a ton of other lexical jawns!
On the pop culture/slang front, a handful of relevant vernacular is now searchable on Dictionary.com. While ‘nepo baby’ (defined as a celebrity with a parent who is also famous, especially one whose industry connections are perceived as essential to their success) and ‘jawn’ (defined as “something or someone for which the speaker does not know or does not need a specific name” and prefaced with “Informal. Chiefly Philadelphia”) are the standouts, the platform also added ‘Blursday’ (“a day not easily distinguished from other days, or the phenomenon of days running together”) and ‘NIL’ (“aspects of a collegiate athlete’s identity for which they may earn money from a third party…”). If you were unaware, a ‘shower orange’ is “an orange that is peeled and eaten under a steamy shower, the purported benefit being that the steam enhances the orange’s citrusy fragrance and creates a soothing experience for the person who is showering.”
Health and wellness concepts such as ‘intermittent fasting’ and ‘stress eating’ also now boast official definitions – as well as ‘coffee nap’ (” short nap, usually 15-30 minutes, taken immediately after drinking a cup of coffee”) and ‘sleep debt’ (“the difference between the amount of sleep a person needs and the actual amount of time spent sleeping, when the amount needed exceeds the time slept.”)
Dictionary.com also taps into the evolving realm of relationships in this fall’s new entries. ‘Polysexual,’ ‘polyromantic,’ ‘autosexual’ and ‘autoromantic’ all make appearances, among a run of other terms related to identity and sexuality.
Under what Dictionary.com calls the “Modern Problems” sector, additions include ‘greenwashing,’ ‘sportswashing’ (“an instance or practice of rehabilitating the bad reputation of a person, company, nation, etc., or mitigating negative press coverage with a sports event, or an appeal to unify and reconcile groups in conflict by celebrating fans’ shared love of a game”), and ‘crypto-fascism.’ A bunch of climate-centric terms landed on the site as well, including ‘climate criminal’ – “a person, business, country, or other entity whose actions or activities are considered particularly destructive to the environment.”
Artificial Intelligence gets its own section, which sees the inclusion of ‘generative AI’ (“artificial intelligence that is designed to process prompts from users and respond with text, images, audio, or other output that is modeled on a training data set”), ‘chatbot’ (“a computer program designed to respond with conversational or informational replies to verbal or written messages from users”) and ‘GPT’ (“generative pre-trained transformer: a type of machine learning algorithm that uses deep learning and a large database of training text in order to generate new text in response to a user’s prompt”). As for science and technology? ‘Algo’ is now officially defined as an “algorithm.”
Other fun additions? ‘Unsee’ joins the archive alongside ‘unsend’, and ‘snite’ – “verb.British. to wipe mucus from (the nose), especially with the finger or thumb.” See the full list of new entries – as well as new and revised definitions – at Dictionary.com
In other news, Google has shared the first quick look at the forthcoming Pixel 8 Smartphone.
Bad AI has a price — and in the case of the United States immigration system, that price could cost people their freedom.
As The Guardian reports, immigration officials have been instructed to use free programs like Google Translate or Microsoft Translator to communicate with the people they detain, which can result in inaccurate or confusing information being given to detainees or put down on their applications.
One agency, Customs and Border Patrol, has created its own translation app, known as "CBP One," but as the report notes, it can only translate to and from a handful of languages, and even in the tongues it recognizes, there are errors.
The report cites a number of examples of this effect, from an FAQ page being transformed into a string of letters when the app is asked to translate into Haitian Creole to asylum applicants being denied because of small grammatical discrepancies.
In one such case recounted by Ariel Koren, the founder of the Respond Crisis Translation emergency interpreter network, an asylum-seeker who was trying to flee her abusive father described the man in colloquial Spanish as "mi jefe," which the translation app took literally to mean her "boss." Her application for asylum was thusly denied.
"Not only do the asylum applications have to be translated, but the government will frequently weaponize small language technicalities to justify deporting someone," Koren, who once worked at Google Translate, told The Guardian. "The application needs to be absolutely perfect."
Dialectics
If things are that bad for Spanish speakers, one can imagine they're worse for those who speak lesser-known dialects. Indeed, as Respond Crisis Translation told The Guardian, there are often issues across agencies and translation apps for Afghan refugees who speak Dari, one of the region's two major dialects. Google Translate, the report notes, doesn't recognize Dari at all.
"Afghan languages are not highly resourced in terms of technology, in particular local dialects," Uma Mirkhail, RCT's lead for Afghan languages, told the British newspaper. "It’s almost impossible for a machine to convey the same message that a professional interpreter with awareness about the country of origin can do, including cultural context."
With systemic biases against non-English speakers in both government and machine learning abounding, it's heartbreaking but not surprising that the tools meant to help immigration officials and the people under their charge communicate end up causing harm and headaches.
"AI translation tools should never be used in a way that is unsupervised," Koren, the RCT founder, said. "They should never be used to replace translators and interpreters and they should not be used in high-stakes situations — not in any language and especially not for languages that are marginalized."
More on AI fails: Gannett Promised to Be Super Responsible With AI Before Completely Bungling It
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