Advertisement

Don't go cray cray, language pedants: English dictionary's been updated

Are you having an FML moment? Are you feeling a bit cray cray because some guy at work has been mansplaining all day to you?

Reading Time:2 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
0
Oxford Dictionaries regularly updates its website to reflect changes in the English vernacular, adding around 1,000 new words every year. Photo: Screenshot

Are you having an FML moment? Are you feeling a bit cray cray because some guy at work has been mansplaining all day to you? Do you want only to stay in and bingewatch TV shows or else trawl through listicles while live-tweeting your miserable evening sarcastically hashtagging YOLO?

Does any of this make sense? If not, don't worry, because seven of the words above have been added to oxforddictionary.com Oxford Dictionaries regularly updates its website to reflect changes in the English vernacular, adding around 1,000 new words every year.

As of today you'll be able to find definitions for increasingly common words in 2014 that may have escaped those who are not glued to social media, as technology continues to play a huge role in the evolution of the language.

Words such as "clickbait", the noun for internet content designed to draw readers to a website, feature heavily on the list of new words released today. Other terms include "geocache", a hidden item whose coordinates have been posted online, and "listicle", an article made up of bullet points. "Cray cray" is informal for crazy.

Other new expressions that germinated online include abbreviations "YOLO" (you only live once), "FML" (f*** my life), and "SMH" (shaking my head) which tend to precede the hashtags and overshares that have become synonymous with Twitter.

Oxford Dictionaries add new words after compiling lists of around 150 million from sources around the world, inputting these into the Oxford English Corpus every month.

Advertisement