“A usually spicy sandwich in Vietnamese cuisine consisting of a split baguette filled typically with meat (such as pork or chicken) and pickled vegetables (such as carrot and daikon) and garnished with cilantro and often cucumbers.” 5. “Excellent, exciting, or extraordinary, especially in a way that is suggestive of a lavish lifestyle.” 4. “Any of various cryptocurrencies that are regarded as alternatives to established cryptocurrencies and especially to Bitcoin.” 3. “Socially awkward or quirky in a way that is endearing.” 2. Read on for a highlight reel of the new entries-and also so you can finally learn what yeet means. This year, Merriam-Webster is formally acknowledging that cringe can be an adjective, and that there’s a difference between calling someone’s outfit a look and a lewk. It’s always especially fun to see which slang terms made the cut. Gastronomic trends can be tracked through terms like omakase, banh mi, and-just in time for autumn- pumpkin spice. The addition of altcoin is a nod to the rising influence of cryptocurrency and anybody who has noticed the increasingly paltry contents of cereal boxes, Doritos bags, and more will no doubt agree that shrinkflation deserves its newly acquired spot in the dictionary. As was the case in 2021, a number of pandemic-related phrases were included in this year’s update-from booster dose to emergency use authorization. The latest batch of additions is similarly entertaining, comprising 370 new words and definitions from all spheres of life. Last year, dad bod, chicharron, and oobleck joined the ranks. EGOT, stan, and bottle episode all earned that honor back in 2019. And that means that if enough people use a certain term in the same way for long enough, it will eventually get an entry of its own. You say, “Let’s do laundry.” That’s not idiomatic.Like all good descriptivist dictionaries, Merriam-Webster seeks to catalog how language is being used rather than dictate how it should be used. When you say, “Let’s do dinner” what you mean is you would like to eat dinner with that person and that doing dinner is different from doing your laundry. How do you explain the word “idea”? How do you explain what the verb “do” means when you can’t use words that are more complicated than “do” or “idea”? You would have to come up with these new ways, new conversational ways of talking. When you’re writing for people who are just learning English, that defining vocabulary has to be tiny. Even if you’re defining for teens, they’re native English speakers, and so you can use what we call defining vocabulary, the types of words that you use to write definitions. You couldn’t take another dictionary and use its word list or its definitions as a basis for this because defining for people who don’t speak English is wildly different than defining for people who do. We began work on a dictionary for adults who are learning English as a foreign language, and it was the first dictionary in company history that had to be written entirely from scratch. The learning curve on this job is crazy long. You’ve been doing this for 20 years now is there something that really stands out to you over your time at Merriam-Webster in terms of defining or editing a word?Ī lot of people ask, “How long does it take to feel like you know what you’re doing?” Because it’s such a complicated process, and I think most of us would agree, it just takes years. If you write dictionaries, you can’t stop reading. I saw someone bring in empty and washed-out cans of cat food that they had found. It’s still alcohol, but people are picking it up that means it’s broadening. That means it’s moving outside the pages of food. I have marked beer bottles for things like “mouthfeel.” You see that word in Food & Wine and in Gourmet and in Bon Appetit, but here’s a beer manufacturer using the word. Someone had marked the Yellow Pages for interesting information. I’ve seen all sorts of stuff that ends up in the database, and that’s always funny. Is it a twerk? Is it twerking? So YouTube is one. I think she watched, possibly, 100 videos of people twerking to figure out what the essential motion behind a twerk was. This is the sort of thing that lexicographers do in the face of that sort of thing. My colleague, Emily Brewster, was responsible for writing the definition for twerk, so she spent a long time on YouTube, watching people twerk. What are some of the more interesting or unusual sources you have to read to figure out how language is being used currently?
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