“Bro-hug,” “Adorbs,” and “Cray” Added to Online Oxford Dictionary

August 21, 2014

Oxford English Dictionary

A new batch of words has been added to the online Oxford Dictionary in its quarterly update, including terms that have taken popular culture by storm, such as bro-hug, adorbs, cray, amazeballs, baller, and SMH, an abbreviation for “shaking my head.”

Editors at Oxford Dictionaries monitor language usage trends, adding new words and phrases once enough evidence to show widespread currency arises. Editor Katherine Connor Martin said in a recent press release, “One of the advantages of our unique language monitoring programme is that it enables us to explore how English language evolves differently across the world. Naturally, many words are used in similar frequencies in the UK and US, for instance the informal additions amazeballs and neckbeard. However, some new slang and informal words catch on much more quickly in a particular variety of English—for instance, in our monitoring sample, side boob is more than ten times more common in the UK than in the US (although this is due in part to its frequent use in the British media), whereas adorbs is used about four times more often in the US as in the UK.”

In addition to the forty-three-word list of informal slang terms such as air punch: “An act of thrusting one’s clenched fist up into the air, typically as a gesture of triumph or elation”; and insults like mansplain: “(Of a man) explain (something) to someone, typically a woman, in a manner regarded as condescending or patronizing,” the database also contains new words produced in the spheres of science and technology, like Deep Web, pharmacovigiliance, e-cig, clickbait, listicle, and subtweet. Check out older quarterly updates to Oxford Dictionaries Online here.

The Oxford English Dictionary, one of the several online and print dictionaries published by Oxford Dictionaries, was also recently updated to include words such as hashtag, and selfie. See the full list here.


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