The Internet has been infecting the Oxford Dictionary of English with already-dated web-based slang for years now. The newest list of words Oxford’s lexicographers have deemed worthy of enshrining in their storied dictionary’s pages reflects the emergence of social media and hacker terminology (“leetspeak“) as well as abiding influence of slackerdom. A random selection of some of the new additions has been culled from the full list below, courtesy of TIME:
- chill pill a notional pill taken to make someone calm down
- chillax calm down and relax
- vuvuzela long horn blown by fans at soccer matches
- buzzkill a person or thing that has a depressing or dispiriting effect
- catastrophizing view or present a situation as considerably worse than it actually is
- frenemy a person with whom one is friendly despite a fundamental dislike or rivalry
- cheeseball lacking taste, style, or originality
- tweetup a meeting organized by means of posts on Twitter
- bromance a close but non-sexual relationship between two men
- defriend another term for unfriend (remove someone from a list of friends or contacts on a social networking site)
Other words include “dictionary attack,” which is an attempt to guess a password using a program that accesses a database of commonly used passwords, “hater,” which seems self-explanatory, and the beloved “Interwebs.”
If any of these bring a groan or three, the folks at Oxford University Press might say we have only ourselves to blame. As Oxford’s head of online dictionaries told TIME, “The dictionary reflects the way the language has changed over the last few years […] We run the biggest language-research program in the world, with an online database of over 2 billion words.”
[TIME]
