8 of the Best New Releases In Translation Out Fall 2023 - Book Riot - Translation

Pierce Alquist is a transplanted New Yorker living and working in the publishing scene in Boston. Don’t worry if she fooled you, the red hair is misleading. She’s a literature in translation devotee and reviewer and lover of small, independent presses. A voracious traveler and foodie, you can find her in her kitchen making borscht or covered in red pepper paste as she perfects her kimchi recipe.

View All posts by Pierce Alquist

Pierce Alquist is a transplanted New Yorker living and working in the publishing scene in Boston. Don’t worry if she fooled you, the red hair is misleading. She’s a literature in translation devotee and reviewer and lover of small, independent presses. A voracious traveler and foodie, you can find her in her kitchen making borscht or covered in red pepper paste as she perfects her kimchi recipe.

View All posts by Pierce Alquist

Pierce Alquist is a transplanted New Yorker living and working in the publishing scene in Boston. Don’t worry if she fooled you, the red hair is misleading. She’s a literature in translation devotee and reviewer and lover of small, independent presses. A voracious traveler and foodie, you can find her in her kitchen making borscht or covered in red pepper paste as she perfects her kimchi recipe.

View All posts by Pierce Alquist

Pierce Alquist is a transplanted New Yorker living and working in the publishing scene in Boston. Don’t worry if she fooled you, the red hair is misleading. She’s a literature in translation devotee and reviewer and lover of small, independent presses. A voracious traveler and foodie, you can find her in her kitchen making borscht or covered in red pepper paste as she perfects her kimchi recipe.

View All posts by Pierce Alquist

Pierce Alquist is a transplanted New Yorker living and working in the publishing scene in Boston. Don’t worry if she fooled you, the red hair is misleading. She’s a literature in translation devotee and reviewer and lover of small, independent presses. A voracious traveler and foodie, you can find her in her kitchen making borscht or covered in red pepper paste as she perfects her kimchi recipe.

View All posts by Pierce Alquist

Pierce Alquist is a transplanted New Yorker living and working in the publishing scene in Boston. Don’t worry if she fooled you, the red hair is misleading. She’s a literature in translation devotee and reviewer and lover of small, independent presses. A voracious traveler and foodie, you can find her in her kitchen making borscht or covered in red pepper paste as she perfects her kimchi recipe.

View All posts by Pierce Alquist

Pierce Alquist is a transplanted New Yorker living and working in the publishing scene in Boston. Don’t worry if she fooled you, the red hair is misleading. She’s a literature in translation devotee and reviewer and lover of small, independent presses. A voracious traveler and foodie, you can find her in her kitchen making borscht or covered in red pepper paste as she perfects her kimchi recipe.

View All posts by Pierce Alquist

Pierce Alquist is a transplanted New Yorker living and working in the publishing scene in Boston. Don’t worry if she fooled you, the red hair is misleading. She’s a literature in translation devotee and reviewer and lover of small, independent presses. A voracious traveler and foodie, you can find her in her kitchen making borscht or covered in red pepper paste as she perfects her kimchi recipe.

View All posts by Pierce Alquist

Pierce Alquist is a transplanted New Yorker living and working in the publishing scene in Boston. Don’t worry if she fooled you, the red hair is misleading. She’s a literature in translation devotee and reviewer and lover of small, independent presses. A voracious traveler and foodie, you can find her in her kitchen making borscht or covered in red pepper paste as she perfects her kimchi recipe.

View All posts by Pierce Alquist

Pierce Alquist is a transplanted New Yorker living and working in the publishing scene in Boston. Don’t worry if she fooled you, the red hair is misleading. She’s a literature in translation devotee and reviewer and lover of small, independent presses. A voracious traveler and foodie, you can find her in her kitchen making borscht or covered in red pepper paste as she perfects her kimchi recipe.

View All posts by Pierce Alquist

Pierce Alquist is a transplanted New Yorker living and working in the publishing scene in Boston. Don’t worry if she fooled you, the red hair is misleading. She’s a literature in translation devotee and reviewer and lover of small, independent presses. A voracious traveler and foodie, you can find her in her kitchen making borscht or covered in red pepper paste as she perfects her kimchi recipe.

View All posts by Pierce Alquist

Pierce Alquist is a transplanted New Yorker living and working in the publishing scene in Boston. Don’t worry if she fooled you, the red hair is misleading. She’s a literature in translation devotee and reviewer and lover of small, independent presses. A voracious traveler and foodie, you can find her in her kitchen making borscht or covered in red pepper paste as she perfects her kimchi recipe.

View All posts by Pierce Alquist

Pierce Alquist is a transplanted New Yorker living and working in the publishing scene in Boston. Don’t worry if she fooled you, the red hair is misleading. She’s a literature in translation devotee and reviewer and lover of small, independent presses. A voracious traveler and foodie, you can find her in her kitchen making borscht or covered in red pepper paste as she perfects her kimchi recipe.

View All posts by Pierce Alquist

Pierce Alquist is a transplanted New Yorker living and working in the publishing scene in Boston. Don’t worry if she fooled you, the red hair is misleading. She’s a literature in translation devotee and reviewer and lover of small, independent presses. A voracious traveler and foodie, you can find her in her kitchen making borscht or covered in red pepper paste as she perfects her kimchi recipe.

View All posts by Pierce Alquist

The mornings are crisp. The days are shorter. Apples, pumpkins, and changing leaves abound in New England, where I live. And the fall books are here! Autumn is always a busy time of year for books, with publishers releasing their big titles in the hope of capturing the interest of readers shopping for the holidays or looking to curl up with a blanket and a good book as the temperatures drop. I’ve poured over the catalogs and galleys and highlighted just some of the best fall 2023 new releases in translation, and because there’s just so much to choose from, I’ve added notes for others you should seek out as well! There’s something for everyone this season, with novels you’ll want to sink into, excellent short story collections, and so much more.

This fall is especially stacked with big releases, and readers will be particularly excited to see new titles from favorite authors like Jhumpa Lahiri and Annie Ernaux and translators like Alison L. Strayer and Janet Hong. But don’t sleep on some of the exciting new voices on this list, too. I’ve included some authors new to English-language audiences as well. It seems like every year, the new titles in translation become more diverse and wide-ranging, especially when it comes to country of origin and language, and it’s a joy — and increasingly a wonderful challenge — to pick from them.

Fall 2023 New Releases In Translation

My Work by Olga Ravn, translated by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell

The Employees by Olga Ravn and translated by Martin Aitken, was one of my favorite books of last year, so I was thrilled to hear about Ravn’s new novel about motherhood. In My Work, a young writer, Anna, writes a diary or journal of sorts about her pregnancy and mental health post-delivery. Blending prose, poetry, diary entries, medical notes, and script, among other forms, this genre-defying novel is a fascinating and ambitious exploration of pregnancy, motherhood, labor, and art. In the hands of translators Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell, this intimate masterpiece is a triumph. (New Directions, October 10)

And don’t miss Bathhouse and Other Tanka by Tatsuhiko Ishii, translated by Hiroaki Sato. (New Directions, November 7)

My Picture Diary by Fujiwara Maki, translated by Ryan Holmberg

Fujiwara Maki was a manga artist, a writer, and an avant-garde actress in the Japanese underground theatre scene. But her accomplishments are more often eclipsed by her position as the wife of legendary manga artist Tsuge Yoshiharu. My Picture Diary was published in Japan in 1982 and is now finally available in an English translation. The diary details a year in the life of Maki, her husband, and their young son. The diary entries portray both a simple story of family life — bike rides, back to school, and bath time — and a powerful critique of the patriarchal systems that Maki struggled against. Her struggles were both external, as a female artist in the male-dominated Japanese counterculture and alt-manga scenes, and internal, exhausted by the sole ownership of household chores and childcare. This important work of reclamation puts her own fascinating career and influence on display. I’m grateful to the award-winning translator and historian Ryan Holmberg and the publisher for bringing this book and their other recent offerings by women in translation, like Talk to My Back by Yamada Murasaki and The Sky is Blue with a Single Cloud by Kuniko Tsurita, to readers. (Drawn & Quarterly, September 19) 

And don’t miss Nejishiki by Yoshiharu Tsuge, translated by Ryan Holmberg. (Drawn & Quarterly, October 3)

The Young Man by Annie Ernaux, translated by Alison L. Strayer

Annie Ernaux was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in literature for the “courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements, and collective restraints of personal memory.” Ernaux is the author of over 30 works of fiction and memoir and is considered by many to be one of France’s most important literary voices. Newly available in English in a stunning translation by Alison L. Strayer, The Young Man is an account of Ernaux’s love affair when she was in her 50s with a man 30 years her junior. Like in her novel Simple Passion and the nonfiction account Getting Lost, both where she details a different affair with a married Soviet diplomat, Ernaux’s brilliance is in her musings, and in The Young Man, she meditates on youth, desire, and time. As always, with Ernaux, there is an intense intimacy, a relentless honesty, that makes you feel alive. (Seven Stories Press, September 12) 

Nefando by Mónica Ojeda, translated by Sarah Booker

Ecuadorian writer Mónica Ojeda was included on the Bógota39 list of the best 39 Latin American writers under 40 in 2017, and in 2019, she received the Prince Claus Next Generation Award. Her English-language debut, Jawbone, also translated brilliantly by Sarah Booker, was a chilling nightmare of girlhood and adolescence, full of body horror, pleasure, and pain, and went on to receive critical acclaim. In this follow-up, she brings her brand of intense psychological horror to the world of technology as the lives of six roommates revolve around a disturbing video game. (Coffee House, October 24)

And don’t miss The Devil of the Provinces by Juan Cárdenas, translated by Lizzie Davis. (Coffee House, September 12)

At Night He Lifts Weights: Stories by Kang Young-sook, translated by Janet Hong

Kang Young-sook is an award-winning author of many novels and short story collections and currently teaches creative writing at Korea National University of Arts. This short story collection is her first to be translated into English by none other than the brilliant Janet Hong. I’m a great admirer of Hong’s translations of the short stories of Ha Seong-Nan and numerous graphic novels by Keum Suk Gendry-Kim, Yeong-Shin Ma, and Ancco, among others. Perceptive and subversive, the stories in At Night He Lifts Weights vary in tone and genre, but each is singularly captivating, swirling around themes of loss — ecological destruction, loneliness, and death. Each has a subtle illusion of calm that conceals what lies below in the unnerving depths. (Transit Books, November 14)

And don’t miss A Shining by the newly announced 2023 Nobel Prize Winner Jon Fosse, translated by Damion Searls. (Transit Books, October 31)

The Owl Cries by Hye-Young Pyun, Translated by Sore Kim-Russell

In this intense, psychological thriller, park ranger In-su Park decides to search for a missing man in the woods after a series of bizarre incidents, including discovering a mysterious note left on his desk that says, “The owl lives in the forest.” Just like in their Shirley Jackson Award–winning The Hole, Hye-Young Pyun and translator Sora Kim-Russell create a fast-paced and all-consuming story with an unusual narrator. In-su Park searches desperately for the missing man while also discovering more than he’d like in the forest, the people around him, and in himself. A novel of secrets, isolation, and pain, The Owl Cries is another tightly executed feat of writing. (Arcade, October 3)

Un Amor by Sara Mesa, translated by Katie Whittemore

I adored Sara Mesa’s sharply written and atmospheric novel of power, privilege, and violence, Four by Four — also translated by Katie Whittemore — and was interested to see this new novel explore many of the same themes. In Un Amor, a young woman arrives in a rural Spanish village to work on her first literary translation, but interactions with the locals quickly become complicated. There is a sustained tension in this atmospheric novel as Mesa explores language and power again but in a different, and maybe even more unsettling location than her last novel. It brings to mind the quiet horror of Marie NDiaye’s That Time of Year, translated by Jordan Stump, and so many other novels of the outsider. This bestselling novel has also just been turned into a film directed by Isabel Coixet. (Open Letter, November 21)

And don’t miss The Culture of Lies by Dubravka Ugresic, translated by Celia Hawkesworth. (Open Letter, September 26)

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Elektrik: Caribbean Writing by Marie-Célie Agnant, Kettly Mars & Others, translated by Danielle Legros Georges, Lucy Scott & Others

I’ve loved the Calico series from Two Lines Press since its inception. The series presents vanguard works of translated literature in vibrant, strikingly designed editions. Each year, they publish two new titles in the Calico series, and each is as good, if not better than the last. Ranging from speculative Chinese fiction to Arabic poetry, Swahili fiction, and more, each book in the series is built around a theme and captures a thrilling and unique moment in international literature. “The Caribbean echoes like a lost world,” writes Mireille Jean-Gilles in Eric Fishman’s translation as she and the other women writers in Elektrik write poignantly about their identity and the Caribbean — the memories, pleasures, traumas, and “lightning visions” of their home. I was especially enamored with the visceral poetry of Haitian writer Marie-Célie Agnant included in the collection, translated in all of its strength and haunting beauty by Danielle Legros Georges. (Two Lines, September 26)

And don’t miss So Many People, Mariana by Maria Judite de Carvalho, translated by Margaret Jull Costa. (Two Lines, October 10)

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For more incredible new releases in translation from this year, check out this list of Hot Summer 2023 New Releases by Women in Translation.

As always, you can find a full list of new releases in the magical New Release Index, carefully curated by your favorite Book Riot editors, organized by genre and release date.

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What is Collins Dictionary's word of the year in 2023? AI - Quartz - Dictionary

The Collins Dictionary word of the year is AI—the widely-used abbreviation for artificial intelligence.

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“Considered to be the next great technological revolution, AI has seen rapid development and has been much talked about in 2023,” the UK dictionary, published by HarperCollins in Glasgow, announced in a blog post today (Nov. 1).

AI has become increasingly embedded in daily lives, from everyday use cases like email that predicts what you’ll say next and Instagram’s beauty filters to bigger phenomenons like healthcare diagnosis and self-driving cars. The tech has even been used to generate fake songs and write closing arguments for lawyers. The advent and upward climb of ChatGPT, with impressive natural speech capabilities, as well as generative image software like DALL-E, blurred the lines between humans and robots.

AI in itself is a hotly debated term, defined as “the modelling of human mental functions by computer programs” by Collins, and it is often the subject of debate. On one hand, the tech reduces human error and speeds up functions, but on the other, it’s viewed as an ethically-ambigious, job-stealing, and data-compromising engine.

The result of all the hype, good and bad, was “an explosion of debate, scrutiny, and prediction,” as per Collins. Usage of the term has apparently quadrupled this year, the BBC reported, citing the publisher.

Just this week, US president Joe Biden issued AI guidelines and vice president Kamala Harris announced the US AI Safety Institute, which will create “guidelines, tools, benchmarks, and best practices” to help mitigate risks from AI, according to a fact sheet. The world’s first AI safety summit starts today (Nov. 1) in the UK, with major economies like India, the US, France, and Singapore in attendance.

Other contenders for Collins’ word of the year for 2023

De-influencing: When social media influencers “warn followers to avoid certain commercial products, lifestyle choices, etc.”

Nepo baby: The label applied to someone “whose career is believed to have been advanced by having famous parents.”

Semaglutide: The active ingredient in type 2 diabetes drug Ozempic and weight-loss drug Wegovy, both of which are made by Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk, now one of the most valuable companies in Europe.

Canon event: Borrowed from literary studies, and a poke at the often too-restrictive demands of comic book fandom in this July’s hit film Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (and, subsequently, a TikTok trend), the phrase has come to mean “an event that is essential to the formation of an individual’s character or identity,” as per Collins.

Ultra-processed: Foods “prepared using complex industrial methods, often using ingredients with little or no nutritional value.”

ULEZ: The acronym for “ultra-low emission zone,” where drivers incur a charge if they drive a polluting vehicle into the city. ULEZ expansion has been a political point of inflection this year.

Greedflation: When businesses use inflation as an excuse to hike prices to boost profit. Companies like PepsiCo and Nestle have been accused of it.

Debanking: Cutting people off from banking—a term largely in the news this year when populist UK politician Nigel Farage claimed his bank, Coutts, tried to close his account because of his political views.

Bazball: The “newly energetic (some say aggressive) form of the game named for England Test coach Brendon ‘Baz’ McCullum,” as defined by Collins.

Word of interest: NFT

AI is not the first tech abbreviation to be declared word of the year by Collins. In 2021, it was NFT (non-fungible tokens). That year, surrealist digital artist Beeple’s NFT of his piece Everydays: The First 5,000 Days—a collage of all the images he’d created since he committed in 2007 to making one every day—sold at Christie’s for a cool $69 million. He also sold another, Human One, for $28 million later that year.

Over the last year, though, these crypto assets appeared to have gone out of fashion., though experts say NFTs aren’t dead yet, just undergoing a market correction with prices cooling as challenges like authentication and preservation are solved.

One more thing: The Beatles are using AI to release their “last song”

Paul McCartney has used AI to help retrieve John Lennon’s vocals from an old demo cassette to create The Beatles’ “last song” Now and Then, which will be released tomorrow (Nov. 2). The track comes more than four decades after Lennon’s death (and nearly 30 years after their last last songs, “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love” were released, also from demo tapes of Lennon’s voice with new backing tracks).

“There it was, John’s voice, crystal clear. It’s quite emotional. And we all play on it, it’s a genuine Beatles recording,” Paul McCartney said.

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‘Bazball’ inclusion in Collins Dictionary ridiculed by Australian cricketers - The Guardian - Dictionary

Australian cricketers have ridiculed the inclusion of the term “Bazball” in the Collins English Dictionary, as they prepare to meet England in the World Cup in Ahmedabad on Saturday.

Bazball is used to describe a style of play implemented by England Test coach and former New Zealand cricketer Brendon “Baz” McCullum, marked by a commitment to risk-taking and quick scoring.

The Collins Dictionary added Bazball to its publication this year and nominated it for word of the year, in a list that also included greedflation, deinfluencing and eventual winner AI.

Australian batter Marnus Labuschagne described the inclusion of Bazball in the dictionary as “garbage”. “Seriously I don’t know what that is, honestly,” he said.

His teammate Steve Smith also laughed when asked about it by reporters in India. “Guys just keep joking about it,” he said. “I think Ronnie [Australian coach Andrew McDonald] has had enough of hearing about Bazball to be honest.”

Australia retained the Ashes this year after the five-match series in England finished 2-2. In the year leading up to that series, McCullum’s England side won 10 of 12 Test matches and scored at 4.76 runs an over – more than one run per over more than any other Test side.

The term Bazball emerged during this period and became the catchcry of a fervent belief among England’s cricketers and fans that their play style was superior to others. Alongside captain Ben Stokes, McCullum even lectured county cricket on the approach and encouraged its adoption.

However, the term has not been universally embraced. McCullum himself described it as “silly” after it was coined in 2022.

“There’s actually quite a bit of thought that goes into how the guys manufacture their performances and when they put pressure on bowlers and which bowlers they put pressure on,” he told radio station SEN. “There’s also times when they’ve absorbed pressure beautifully as well.”

England’s one-day side, coached by Australian Matthew Mott, is bottom of the 10-team pool at the World Cup, having won just one of six matches.

Australia sit third, with games against Afghanistan and Bangladesh to follow this weekend’s England clash, as they look to secure a place in the semi-finals starting on 15 November.

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Who Made the Oxford English Dictionary? - The Atlantic - Dictionary

The Oxford English Dictionary always seemed to me like the Rules from on high—near biblical, laid down long ago by a distant academic elite. But back in 1857, when the idea of the dictionary was born, its three founders proposed something more democratic than authoritative: a reference book that didn’t prescribe but instead described English, tracking the meaning of every word in the language across time and laying out how people were actually using each one.

As Sarah Ogilvie writes in her new book, The Dictionary People, the OED’s founders realized that such a titanic task could never be accomplished by a small circle of men in London and Oxford, so they sought out volunteers. That search expanded when the eccentric philologist James Murray took the helm in 1879 as the Dictionary’s third editor. Murray cast a far wider net than his predecessors had, circulating a call for contributors to newspapers, universities, and clubs around the globe. He instructed people to read the books they had on hand, fill 4-by-6-inch slips of paper with quotations that showed how words were used therein, and send them to his “Scriptorium” (the iron shed behind his house where he and a devoted crew worked on the Dictionary). The wave of submissions was so overwhelming that the Royal Mail installed a red post box in front of his home in Oxford, which remains there today.

One of the greatest crowdsourcing efforts in history—“the Wikipedia of the nineteenth century,” as Ogilvie puts it—the OED would not have been possible without this army of volunteers. And yet, for years, most have remained unknown. In his exuberant 2003 history of the OED, The Meaning of Everything, Simon Winchester devoted a chapter to the Dictionary’s contributors—not just the readers who sent in slips, but the subeditors who sorted submissions chronologically and by meaning, and the specialists who advised on specific terminology or etymologies. Winchester served up small biographies of a few key figures but lamented of the group that “their legacy … remains essentially unwritten.” In The Dictionary People, Ogilvie sets out to correct the record. A former editor at the Oxford English Dictionary, Ogilvie stumbled upon Murray’s address books while passing time in the Dictionary’s archives. Upon learning that the number of volunteers wasn’t merely hundreds (as scholars long believed) but some 3,000, she became determined to track each of them down.

The Dictionary People - The Unsung Heroes Who Created The Oxford English Dictionary

By Sarah Ogilvie

The resulting book is, like the Dictionary itself, a clear labor of love, both playful and doggedly researched. Ogilvie spent eight years trawling through libraries and dusty archives across the globe. She pored over the editors’ correspondence, mapped how news of the project spread across social clubs in Britain and beyond, and even recruited a handwriting expert to help determine who was behind scores of the raciest slips. She orders her history alphabetically, categorizing the keenest and quirkiest contributors into different groups—“I for Inventors,” “S for Suffragists,” “M for Murderers”—and offering bite-size biographies of dozens of figures.

Under “Q for Queers,” we meet Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, an aunt and niece who, in the late 1800s, became lovers and literary collaborators, publishing plays and poetry under the pen name Michael Field. (Critics gushed about Field, comparing “him” to Shakespeare.) In her spare time, Katharine sent in quotations from John Ruskin and The Iliad. We meet the owner of the world’s largest collection of erotica at the time, who is thought to have supplied sentences for words related to genitalia, bondage, and flagellation—along with spicier quotations for otherwise-innocuous entries. We encounter Karl Marx’s daughter Eleanor, whose half-baked efforts exasperated Murray, and the much more devoted William Chester Minor, a former American Army surgeon who submitted 62,720 slips from the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum, where he was sent after murdering a man. (Dr. Minor was allowed to keep a separate cell for his books.)

What starts out as a detective story quickly evolves into an ode to the outsider. Some famous figures make appearances in The Dictionary People—the photographer Eadweard Muybridge, known for his studies of animal motion, advised on entries, including the one for gallop; and a young J. R. R. Tolkien was an editorial assistant for a year, during which time he worked on the letter W, puzzling over possible etymologies of the word walrus. But Ogilvie marvels that many of the Dictionary’s key contributors were “on the edges of academia.” They were inventors and pioneers with radical ideas; women (at a time when many were denied higher education) and other autodidacts; asylum patients and recluses. This motley crew shared a hunger to be associated with the prestigious Oxford University, to be part of a project of national importance. Perhaps this desire for belonging powered their obsessive (often unpaid) devotion to the undertaking? Perhaps, for those cast aside by society, like Dr. Minor, their involvement was redemptive? Ogilvie doesn’t linger long on their motives, preferring instead to assemble surprising bits of trivia about each figure.

The most compelling portrait is that of Murray, the Dictionary’s longest-serving editor, who emerges as the book’s protagonist. The son of a village tailor in Scotland, Murray left school at 14, eventually becoming a bank clerk and then a teacher at Mill Hill School in London. Over the years, he taught himself to read some 25 languages, including Tongan and Russian, and developed an interest in philology, writing books on Scottish dialects. In the late 1860s, he was invited to join the London Philological Society, where the idea for the OED had been born in 1857. But as a teetotaling Scot with little formal education, Murray was continually excluded from the indulgent academic establishment of Oxford. He was never made a fellow of a University college, and he wasn’t granted an honorary doctorate until 1914, the year before he died.

The OED’s progress had stalled under Murray’s predecessor, Frederick Furnivall, whose involvement with various academic clubs left him little time to actually edit (but had the benefit, Ogilvie points out, of bringing in a steady stream of contributors). Murray revived the project. For 36 years, he devoted himself to an undertaking that, he noted late in life, “should have been the work of a celibate and ascetic.” He rose by five each morning and spent the day writing letters to volunteers, sorting words into their shades of meaning, and drafting definitions. He was often spotted delivering copy to the publisher by tricycle, his long white beard trailing behind him as he pedaled wildly about town. Murray’s wife, Ada, was instrumental, managing his finances and acting as his personal secretary. Even his kids were involved: Murray brought slips to the table to discuss over lunch and recruited each of his 11 children to sort submissions. For all this, he was paid a pitiful sum, which had to cover not just his wages but those of the Scriptorium staff and the Dictionary’s expenses.

Over the years, Murray resisted calls from the publisher and reviewers to narrow the Dictionary’s scope. He was pressured to use quotations from only the “great authors,” eschew slang, and omit words deemed too scientific or vulgar or foreign. Murray refused, believing that all of the English language had a valid place in the Dictionary, just as all contributors who put in the work were welcome. As Ogilvie shows in her earlier, wonkier history of the OED, Words of the World, as an editor, Murray was particularly devoted to including foreign words that had entered into English—a stance that can be read as either inclusive or colonizing, though Ogilvie seems to lean toward the former.

Murray died in 1915, shortly after finishing the entry for twilight, and 13 years before the OED’s monumental first edition was completed. The Dictionary has continued to evolve with the world; its third edition, which Ogilvie worked on, has been in progress since 1993, and uses the editing process devised by Murray. (Recent additions include deepfake, teen idol, and textspeak.) In her final chapter, Ogilvie visits a man named Chris Collier from her hometown of Brisbane, Australia, who sent in 100,000 slips from 1975 to 2010. Collier cut quotations out of his local newspaper and pasted them directly onto slips, which arrived at the OED offices wrapped in old cornflakes packaging. “I thought to myself, imagine if I could help get one word into the dictionary,” he told Ogilvie. To his neighbors, he was the local nudist (he was known to take naked evening walks), but in certain Oxford circles he was practically famous, having supplied thousands of new words.

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‘AI’ named most notable word of 2023 by Collins dictionary - The Guardian - Dictionary

The technology that is set to dominate the future – for good or ill – is now the word of the year. “AI” has been named the most notable word of 2023 by the dictionary publisher Collins.

Defined as “the modelling of human mental functions by computer programs”, AI was chosen because it “has accelerated at such a fast pace and become the dominant conversation of 2023”, the publisher said. The use of the word (strictly an initialism) has quadrupled over the past year.

It was chosen from a list of new terms that the publisher said reflect “our ever-evolving language and the concerns of those who use it”. They include “greedflation”, defined as “the use of inflation as an excuse to raise prices to artificially high levels in order to increase corporate profits”, and “debanking”, “the act of depriving a person of banking facilities”.

“Nepo baby”, the term used to describe the sons and daughters of celebrities whose careers are assumed to have taken off thanks to their famous parent, and “deinfluencing” made the list. “ “Deinfluencing” is defined by Collins lexicographers as “the use of social media to warn followers to avoid certain commercial products, lifestyle choices, etc”.

The annual word of the year is selected by lexicographers monitoring a range of sources, including social media, according to the publisher. Last year’s term was “permacrisis”, while “NFT” was chosen the previous year. Perhaps unsurprisingly, 2020’s word of the year was “lockdown”.

Health concerns were prominent in 2023, according to the publisher. “Ultra-processed”, meaning food that is “prepared using complex industrial methods from multiple ingredients, often including ingredients with little or no nutritional value”, is listed, as is “semaglutide”, the appetite-suppressing medication. The use of the term has tripled in the past year.

The acronym “Ulez” made the cut – the term meaning ultra-low emissions zone that refers to an area of central London in which more polluting vehicles are restricted.

“Bazball”, a style of test cricket in which the batting side plays in a highly aggressive manner, was noted by the dictionary, named after the former New Zealand cricketer and coach, Brendon “Baz” McCullum. The term “canon event”, “an episode that is essential to the formation of an individual’s character or identity”, became popular thanks to the movie Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.

Alex Beecroft, the managing director of Collins, said there was “no question” that AI had been “the talking point of 2023”.

“We know that AI has been a big focus this year in the way that it has developed and has quickly become as ubiquitous and embedded in our lives as email, streaming or any other once futuristic, now everyday technology.”

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AI Named Word Of The Year By Collins Dictionary - NDTV - Dictionary

The abbreviation of artificial intelligence (AI) has been named the Collins Word of the Year for 2023.

London:

The abbreviation of artificial intelligence (AI) has been named the Collins Word of the Year for 2023, the dictionary publisher said on Tuesday.

Lexicographers at Collins Dictionary said use of the term had "accelerated" and that it had become the dominant conversation of 2023.

"We know that AI has been a big focus this year in the way that it has developed and has quickly become as ubiquitous and embedded in our lives as email, streaming or any other once futuristic, now everyday technology," Collins managing director Alex Beecroft said.

Collins said its wordsmiths analysed the Collins Corpus, a database that contains more than 20 billion words with written material from websites, newspapers, magazines and books published around the world.

It also draws on spoken material from radio, TV and everyday conversations, while new data is fed into the Corpus every month, to help the Collins dictionary editors identify new words and meanings from the moment they are first used.

"Use of the word as monitored through our Collins Corpus is always interesting and there was no question that this has also been the talking point of 2023," Beecroft said.

Other words on Collins list include "nepo baby", which has become a popular phrase to describe the children of celebrities who have succeeded in industries similar to those of their parents.

"Greedflation", meaning companies making profits during the cost of living crisis, and "Ulez", the ultra-low emission zone that penalises drivers of the most-polluting cars in London, were also mentioned.

Social media terms such as "deinfluencing" or "de-influencing", meaning to "warn followers to avoid certain commercial products", were also on the Collins list.

This summer's Ashes series between England and Australia had many people talking about a style of cricket dubbed "Bazball", according to Collins.

The term refers to New Zealand cricketer and coach Brendon McCullum, known as Baz, who advocates a philosophy of relaxed minds, aggressive tactics and positive energy.

The word "permacrisis", defined as "an extended period of instability and insecurity" was the Collins word of the year in 2022.

In 2020, it was "lockdown". In 2016, it was "Brexit".

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

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‘AI’ named most notable word of 2023 by Collins dictionary - The Guardian - Dictionary

The technology that is set to dominate the future – for good or ill – is now the word of the year. “AI” has been named the most notable word of 2023 by the dictionary publisher Collins.

Defined as “the modelling of human mental functions by computer programs”, AI was chosen because it “has accelerated at such a fast pace and become the dominant conversation of 2023”, the publisher said. The use of the word (strictly an initialism) has quadrupled over the past year.

It was chosen from a list of new terms that the publisher said reflect “our ever-evolving language and the concerns of those who use it”. They include “greedflation”, defined as “the use of inflation as an excuse to raise prices to artificially high levels in order to increase corporate profits”, and “debanking”, “the act of depriving a person of banking facilities”.

“Nepo baby”, the term used to describe the sons and daughters of celebrities whose careers are assumed to have taken off thanks to their famous parent, and “deinfluencing” made the list. “ “Deinfluencing” is defined by Collins lexicographers as “the use of social media to warn followers to avoid certain commercial products, lifestyle choices, etc”.

The annual word of the year is selected by lexicographers monitoring a range of sources, including social media, according to the publisher. Last year’s term was “permacrisis”, while “NFT” was chosen the previous year. Perhaps unsurprisingly, 2020’s word of the year was “lockdown”.

Health concerns were prominent in 2023, according to the publisher. “Ultra-processed”, meaning food that is “prepared using complex industrial methods from multiple ingredients, often including ingredients with little or no nutritional value”, is listed, as is “semaglutide”, the appetite-suppressing medication. The use of the term has tripled in the past year.

The acronym “Ulez” made the cut – the term meaning ultra-low emissions zone that refers to an area of central London in which more polluting vehicles are restricted.

“Bazball”, a style of test cricket in which the batting side plays in a highly aggressive manner, was noted by the dictionary, named after the former New Zealand cricketer and coach, Brendon “Baz” McCullum. The term “canon event”, “an episode that is essential to the formation of an individual’s character or identity”, became popular thanks to the movie Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.

Alex Beecroft, the managing director of Collins, said there was “no question” that AI had been “the talking point of 2023”.

“We know that AI has been a big focus this year in the way that it has developed and has quickly become as ubiquitous and embedded in our lives as email, streaming or any other once futuristic, now everyday technology.”

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