This Wednesday, the Oxford English Dictionary announced the addition of 60 new words to its online database, some of which include slang terms and abbreviations that may surprise you. With the growing use of advanced technology and social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, several words have arisen entirely out of the digital age.
Terms you’ve probably been using for a while now, such as ‘selfie,’ a self portrait uploaded onto a social media platform, ‘emoji,’ a cartoon emoticon that can replace words in a text, and possibly phablet, which refers to an oversized smartphone that in appearance and function, resembles a cross between a tablet, computer, and a smartphone, were included on this list of up and coming vocabulary.
The organization explained in a blog post,“The additions may have only just entered the dictionary, but we’ve been watching them for a while now, tracking how and where they are used.” In fact, the words, ‘selfie’ and ‘phablet,’ were both included in the Oxford Dictionary Blog’s Words on the Radar list as early as June 2012, only just making it into the official dictionary over a year later.
If you’re interested in seeing which of the latest additions to the database words you already know, and becoming acquainted with the ones you don’t, be sure check out the list on the Oxford English Dictionary’s Blog.