Day 11: New words

This month, 86 new words were added to the Collins online dictionary, and they are currently being reviewed over whether they'll be added to the hard copy of the dictionary. The majority of the words are slang, so, as a teenager, I feel as though I am of the perfect age group to recognise many of these new words. And yet, there are so many words -- such as "amazeballs" -- that I've never heard used unironically, as well as many that I've never heard at all: "frenemy", for example, is an enemy who is also a friend, and "tiger mother" is a particularly strict mum.

There are certain additions of which I very much approve. I've no idea how "fanboy" hasn't ended up in the dictionary before now; "geekism", while not a word I use, is pretty cool. My personal favourite is "bunbury", taken from Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Ernest. I grinned when I saw that on the list.

Several words added are to do with social networking; dictionaries are often very slow at adding new words and they seem a bit behind when it comes to the internet. "Facebook" was not officially a word until now. "BBM", "cyberbully", "frape", "IM", "liveblog" and "twitterer" are all on the list of new words.

I expect that some of the slang is used by children of maybe 9-13, such as "vom" (vomit) and "verbal diarrhoea". Other slang is genuinely used by people I know, e.g. "bang tidy", "lush" (I hate that word phonetically), and "totes" (which I just hate -- it's a terrible word, guys). There's also "lollage", "lolz", and "thanx"; as much as I'm all for the evolution of language, these annoyed me. "Lol" is one thing, but misspelt variations of words made up by kids who thought they were clever for doing it do not belong in the dictionary. Collins should employ me for this job. Particularly because I could have stopped "mummy porn" from entering the dictionary, as it literally refers to erotica aimed at middle-aged women, i.e. Fifty Shades of Gray. Was that really necessary? Nope.

And, of course, there were some more practical, formal words, "bioarchaeology", "hyperconnectivity", and "claustrophilia" being a few of them.

There you have it: everything from "lolz" to "bunbary" was added to the online dictionary this month. I think that perhaps the editors whose job this is should be more familiar with common slang before they pick and choose what is and isn't a real word, but that will remain impossible as only children and teenagers seem to use such awful (I mean, um, inventive) lexis.

Thanks to Marco for suggesting that I write about this! The full list of new words can be found here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/9535163/Amazeballs-to-Zing-new-words-added-to-Collins-online-dictionary.html