New words to add to your language
I always enjoy seeing what the new words are that will be added to our dictionaries. In its 2022 edition, Merriam-Webster (MW) has added 455 new words and definitions! Wow! Some are slang terms, while others are words that seem like they should have been added long ago. The thing is, many of these do not sound like new words to us because we’ve already been hearing them, so it seems natural that they would be in a dictionary.
MW categorizes its new additions into several groups based on their source, including words from online culture and communication, coronavirus words and words from tech and science. There are also new food words, words from pop culture, politics, and from the world of medicine, and other notable terms from business, sports and home security.
Internet slang words include abbreviations such as “TBH” (to be honest) and “FTW” (for the win). These texting and social media abbreviations are good examples of how our language is constantly evolving and how (and why!) dictionaries must keep expanding! “Copypasta” (often used in lighthearted memes, meaning data, such as text, that has been copied and spread widely online.) Copypasta—although I’ve never heard the term—has been a major feature of the COVID-19 pandemic and the misinformation associated with it (data that has been copied and spread widely online).
There are other words that have been added that relate to the pandemic, words/terms which we have heard, such as “super-spreader” (a person who is highly contagious or an event or location at which a significant number of people contract the same communicable disease); “vaccine passport” (a physical or digital document providing proof of vaccination against one or more infectious diseases); and “long COVID” (a condition that is marked by the presence of symptoms, such as fatigue, cough, shortness of breath, headache, or brain fog, which persist for an extended period of time following a person’s initial recovery from COVID-19 infection).
Several food-related words were also added, including a sandwich that I’ve never heard of and obviously not tried, “fluffernutter” (a sandwich made with peanut butter and marshmallow crème). “Chicharron” (a small piece of pork belly or pig skin that is fried and eaten usually as a snack) is a new word that I don’t even know how to pronounce. But then there are some new additions that I am very familiar with, such as “air fryer” (a small electrical appliance for quick cooking of foods by means of convection currents circulated rapidly by a fan).
In the pop-culture category, a couple of fun additions are “faux-hawk” (a term that rhymes with ‘Mohawk’ and is actually a hairstyle resembling a Mohawk); and “dad bod” (a physique regarded as typical of an average father, especially one that is slightly overweight and not extremely muscular). Picture those two terms combined and you’ve got quite a “rad dad!” Hmmm.....did I just create a new term?
Come back to this space next week for some additional words that are considered worthy of being added to our dictionaries!
