A friend sent me a link to a cracked.com article about new words recently added to the Oxford English Dictionary. The article listed fifteen amusing words, from Bouncebackability (ability to recover from a setback) through Cyberslacking (you can probably guess that one) and Threequel (one more than a sequel) to Prebuttal (pre-emptive rebuttal). It was clear that these were "new words" and not words the the OED had somehow overlooked all these years.The article piqued my interest in that twenty-volume repository of the English Language. How do they keep up with the dynamic growth of English? The OED currently contains about 60 million words, but new words keep popping out of the ether, so the busy OED editors are constantly discovering and including new words. And watching and thinking about words they may add in the future, like earworm: the tune that you can't get out of your head.
The OED editors periodically announce additions and updates to the existing content on their website (oed.com). Here are a few selected new entries that were published just this month:
Of course, you know what all of those words mean. Well, not plasmoditrophoblast, I suppose, unless you are perhaps a plasmoditrophoblastologist. And why did it take so long to get fudgsicle and grilled cheese? Swotty is obviously about studying too much, as you probably knew. But then there’s turducken down there at the bottom. That's a catchy little word, about which the OED has this to say:
| amateur night, n. and adj. | dwarf planet, n. |
| bailout, n. | fudgsicle, n. |
| blue state, n. and adj. | grilled cheese, n. |
| Bushian, adj. | plasmoditrophoblast, n. |
| Clintonesque, adj. | searchability, n. |
| commitment-phobia, n. | swotty, n. and adj. |
| configurable, adj. | turducken, n. |
Of course, you know what all of those words mean. Well, not plasmoditrophoblast, I suppose, unless you are perhaps a plasmoditrophoblastologist. And why did it take so long to get fudgsicle and grilled cheese? Swotty is obviously about studying too much, as you probably knew. But then there’s turducken down there at the bottom. That's a catchy little word, about which the OED has this to say:
"A coming together of three words and of three birds. As a blend of the nouns duck and chicken are affixed to the first part of the word turkey, so a boned chicken is used to stuff a boned duck, which is in turn used to stuff a partially boned turkey. The result, in both cases, might equally be regarded as inventive, elegant, and appetizing, or as an ungainly way of overdoing things somewhat.”
Say waiter, on second thought I think I’ll just have a salad.
Postscript. The Oxford Latin Dictionary (OLAT) also has some new words. The Oxford editors want the Latin repository to be as complete and up-to-date as the English dictionary. So here are the new Latin words recently included: Just kidding. Latin is a dead language. You knew that. Quisque comoedus est.
How about a grilled Turducken sandwich with cheese? Is there a word for that? Maybe in Latin.
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