Do you humblebrag about your neckbeard and sideboob? How adorbs. The latest intake of works to OxfordDictionaries.com show how language emerging on social media and the internet are increasingly entering common use, says a telegraph report.
“New entires include humblebrag, which refers to a post or comment made by someone that boasts about an achievement in the same sentence as a self-deprecating comment. Abbreviations that are often used on sites such as Twitter, where the number of characters that can be posed are limited, are also among the new entrants.
These include adorbs, an adjective that is popular that means something is cute or adorable, and Yolo, favourite with teenagers which is an acronym of You Only Live Once. According to OxfordDictionaries.com’s language monitoring programme, the use of binge-watch increased fourfold in February and tripled in June, based on its average use over the last two years,” according to the report.
“They said there were spikes around the releases of House Of Cards season two in February 2014 and Orange Is The New Black season two in June 2014. Changes in our media consumption habits also have also seen hate-watch – watching a programme for the sake of the enjoyment derived from mocking or criticising it – being added to the list of new words.
Technology in general has a strong influence on the English language, with other new entires including acquihire, clickbait, Deep Web, dox, fast follower, geocache, in silico, octocopter, responsive, smartwatch, and tech-savvy.”
“The Oxford Corpus reveals an approximate tenfold increase in usage of the terms vape and e-cig in the last two years, as electronic devices which enable people to inhale smokeless nicotine vapour have become increasingly widespread. E-cigarette, added to OxfordDictionaries.com in August 2012, has seen an even sharper rise in usage.
However, despite the fact that e-cigarettes were not commercially available until the 21st century, the word vaping dates to 1983, when it was used to describe a hypothetical smoking device being considered at the time, adds the report.
“Other informal or slang terms added include bank of mum and dad, bro hug, cray, hench, hot mess, mansplain, side-eye, side boob and spit-take. The abbreviation cray – meaning crazy – seems to have arisen initially in the reduplicated form cray cray in the early 2000s, but it was popularised in its single-syllable form when used by Kanye West in the hook to a track from his collaboration album with Jay Z.
New words, senses, and phrases are added to OxfordDictionaries.com once editors have gathered enough independent evidence from a range of sources to be confident that they have widespread currency in English,” says the Telegraph.
Oxford Dictionaries editor Katherine Connor Martin said: “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 10 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.”