Internet slang added to Cambridge Dictionary
Merriam-Webster announced Thursday it has taken the rare step of fully revising and reimagining one of its most popular dictionaries with a fresh edition that adds over 5,000 new words, including "doomscroll," "WFH," "dumbphone" and "ghost kitchen."
Other additions: "cold brew," "farm-to-table," "rizz," "dad bod," "hard pass," "adulting" and "cancel culture," as well as "petrichor," "teraflop" and "side-eye."
There's also "beast mode" and "dashcam."
The 12th edition of "Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary" comes 22 years after the book's last hard-copy update and amid declining U.S. sales for analog dictionaries overall, according to Circana BookScan. It will be released Nov. 18, with preorders now available.
Petrichor is a pleasant odor after a rainfall following a warm, dry period. Teraflop is a unit of measure for calculating the speed of a computer. Dumbphones are just that, the mobile devices used before the smartphone revolution that may be making a comeback. And ghost kitchens, which came into their own during the pandemic, are commercial spaces for hire.
The new "Collegiate" also includes enhanced entries for some top lookups, and more than 20,000 new usage examples. All of the added words were already available on Merriam-Webster.com.
The chunky, linen-cover "Collegiate" update weighs in at nearly five pounds. The company removed two sections of the "Collegiate's" 11th edition that had sparse biographical and geographical entries to make room for the new content.
Greg Barlow, Merriam-Webster's president, exclusively told The Associated Press ahead of the announcement that people no longer use dictionaries to learn such things as the location of Kalamazoo, a city in southwest Michigan, or about the identity of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, a Russian composer who died in 1908. For that, they reach for the internet.
Merriam-Webster also eliminated some obscure and antiquated words, including "enwheel," meaning encircle.
"We wanted to make the 'Collegiate' more useful, a better design, more interesting," Barlow said. "We wanted it to be more rewarding to browse, more fun to look through, and to really be practical for research, but also a beautiful book."
Merriam-Webster, the country's leading dictionary company, sells about 1.5 million tomes a year. Most are regularly revised but not fully overhauled like the "Collegiate," Barlow said. The company's retail sales overall have generally held steady in the last few years, he said. Print sales account for a small fraction of the company's revenue.
"While the print dictionary is not at all important to the growth and profitability of this wonderful language company, it's still our heart," Barlow said. "There are people out there who just love books, and we love books."
Cambridge Dictionary also recently added thousands of new words, driven by social media and celebrities. A number of the new words were popularized by Gen Z and Gen Alpha. Among the new entries: skibidi, delulu, tradwife and broligarchy.
"Internet culture is changing the English language and the effect is fascinating to observe and capture in the Dictionary," Colin McIntosh, the lexical program manager at Cambridge Dictionary, said in August in a statement.
