English language added 690 new words

As we spend a few moments reflecting on the year as it draws to a close, we couldn’t help but consider some of the new words that have arisen to describe it during these last 12 months.

According to the folks over at Merriam-Webster—they’re the people who write most of our U.S. dictionaries, in case that name doesn’t ring any bells—some 690 new words were introduced to the English language in 2023.

That announcement came in September, which was followed almost instantly by counterclaims made by the folks across the pond over at the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), in Great Britain, who said that number was substantially fewer.

Still, at 650 new words by their mark, perhaps they should make use of their own product to rediscover what the phrase “substantially fewer” really means.

Over at Dictionary. com, the online dictionary not bound by continents, they pegged it at about half that number (take note OED people) at just 313 new words. Of course, their list was released months before, in February 2023, which was barely enough time to come up with anything close to an exhaustive list for 2023, I would tend to think.

Still, Dictionary. com was one of the few sources that offered any explanation as to how and why words get added to their publication. “We don’t make up words,” they said. “Words are added because they’re really used by real people in the real world.”

Dictionary.com further added that they use the following criteria to determine what words are added: 1.) It’s a word that’s used by a lot of people; 2.) It’s used by those people in largely the same way; 3.) It’s likely to stick around; and 4.) It’s useful for a general audience.

One notable change this year, plucked directly from headlines of late, wasn’t so much a new word as it was a change in how that word appears in print.

It came with adjusting anti-Semitism to antisemitism. Dictionary. com said the decision to remove the hyphen and fully lowercase the word was done because it’s the “widely preferred single word form that Jewish groups, and many style guides, including those of major publications, have also adopted.” The definition of the word— discrimination against, prejudice or hostility toward Jews—did not change.

The following are just a few new words added to our lexicon in 2023:

bedwetting: (verb, informal) exhibition of emotional overreaction, as anxiety or alarm, to events, especially major decisions or outcomes.

bingo card: (noun, slang) a list of possible, expected, or likely scenarios — usually used in the phrase “on one’s bingo card.”

dap: (noun) a casual gesture of greeting, acknowledgment or affirmation, typically involving slapping palms, bumping fists or snapping fingers. The word “dap” emerged in the late 1960s among Black GIs serving abroad in the Vietnam War and re-emerged with the pandemic as a description of the gestures that replaced handshakes as a commonplace form of greeting.

liminal space: (noun) a state or place characterized by being transitional or intermediate in some way; any location that is unsettling, uncanny or dreamlike.

mid: (adjective) neither very good nor very bad; so-so, meh.

nearlywed: (noun, slang) a person who lives with another in a life partnership, sometimes engaged with no planned wedding date, sometimes with no intention of ever marrying.

ngl: (abbreviation, informal) used in place of “not gonna lie” or “not going to lie.”

padawan: (noun, informal) a young person especially when regarded as naïve, inexperienced, etc.

pinkwashing: (verb) to promote the civil liberties of the LGBTQ+ community, but superficially, as a ploy to divert attention from allegiances or activities that are, in fact, contrary or hostile to such liberties.

rage farming: (verb) the tactic of intentionally provoking political opponents, typically by posting inflammatory content on social media to elicit angry responses and thus gain high engagement or widespread exposure to the original poster

woke: (adjective) of or relating to a liberal progressive orthodoxy, especially those which promote policies or ideologies that welcome or embrace ethnic, racial or sexual minorities; (and to demonstrate that words can have decisively different meanings depending on the speaker of them) it’s also defined as “a divisive slang word which means to be alert to social justice.”

Word Play is an occasional column penned by Managing Editor Bobby Horecka on words and oft strange stories behind them.