New Words in the 2016 Merriam-Webster Update

We use new words all the time, sometimes because of new technology, sometimes because of trends, and occasionally because somebody just came up with a really good word that caught on. 

To keep their dictionaries relevant, editors need to always be adding these new words and also updating entries to include new meanings for old words, but they don’t just add words as soon as they hear them or see them. The editors carefully watch words to see how they are being used and whether they seem to have some staying power or are just part of a trend that will be gone next year. 

How Words Are Chosen

According to the Merriam-Webster website, to be included in the dictionary, a word must “be used in a substantial number of citations that come from a wide range of publications over a considerable period of time.”

For example, Merriam-Webster added athleisure to the unabridged dictionary, but the editors had been watching the word for a while before they decided to add it. In a “Words We’re Watching” blog post in July of 2015, they wrote “Athleisure refers to casual clothing — like yoga pants, sweat pants, and hoodies — that are designed to be worn both for exercising and for doing (almost) everything else.” They cited recent examples from the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and Paste Magazine, and noted that they had at least one citation from way back in 1979． They weren’t quite ready to add it to the dictionary in 2015, but now, in 2016 it made the cut.

Familiar Words

I’m betting some of the words they added are familiar to most of you: 

• Bitcoin, the digital currency. The first known use of bitcoin was in 2008. 
• Urban fantasy, which is a type of fiction that sets fantasy elements such as elves and fairies in urban settings. Urban fantasy is older than bitcoin, with the first known use in 1978. 
• TMI, which is an abbreviation for too much information. I use that with my dad because he has a tendency to over share. 
• Hella, which you’ve almost certainly heard if you’ve lived on the West Coast since the early ’90s.’ It’s slang used to mean “very” or “a lot of” as in I get hella excited with they add new words, and They added hella words to the dictionary. 

Other words that might sound familiar to you include cold one (to mean “a cold beer”), coconutty (to describe something that tastes of coconut), cold case (to describe an unsolved criminal investigation), toon (as an abbreviation for cartoon), and life hack (which is two words and usually refers to a simple and clever tip or technique for accomplishing some familiar task more easily and efficiently).

Unfamiliar Words

Some words they added that I had not heard before include

• Fit-and-flare, which is an adjective that describes something that is “fitted through the waist and flaring out at or below the hips,” as in The new clothing line includes several fit-and-flare dresses and coats.
• Nomophobia, which describes the fear of being without access to a working cell phone.” It comes from the concept of no mobile, as in no cell phone, plus phobia.  You’d use it like this: 66% of people suffer from nomophobia. and 
• Dipsogenic, which is an adjective you use to describe something that produces thirst. It comes form the Greek word dipsa for “thirst” plus the –genic suffix. For example, scientists might talk about a dipsogenic drive or a dipsogenic response. and 
• Mx., which is a gender-neutral courtesy title like Mr., Mrs., and Ms., and is labeled for now as “chiefly British” because it’s used more often in Britain than in the US. 

All in all, in this update, the editors added more than 1,400 new terms and phrases, and more than 700 new senses of existing terms.

Up-and-Coming Words

If you want a hint about words that could be included in future updates, recent “Words We’re Watching” posts on the Merriam-Webster site include showrunner, which means “the producer of a television series who has ultimate managerial and creative control,” a new sense for the word ghosting (to describe someone you’ve communicated with who then stops answering your messages), and a new sense for burner, as in a burner phone to describe something disposable that can’t be traced. 

How do they find all these words? Well, part of the each editor’s job is to spend an hour or two a day reading a wide variety of published material looking for new words, new meanings for old words, and so on. It sounds like a pretty great job.