Don’t know what “vaping” is? How about “listicle”?
Perhaps, it is time to get to know them. The Oxford University Press said on Thursday that it was adding these words, along with other new entries such as “time-poor” and “Paleo diet”, to its online Oxford Dictionaries to reflect new language trends.
Editors for the site track and analyse some 150 million English words used online, in newspapers and other sources, and once every few months, they decide which new words are so widely used that they merit a dictionary entry.
“These are words that are common enough that you are likely to encounter them, and may have to look up their meanings,” said Oxford Dictionaries Editor Katherine Martin.
One of these is “vape” or “vaping,” which describes inhaling smokeless nicotine vapour using e-cigarettes. Oxford Dictionaries researchers say the usage of both “vape” and “e-cig” has increased about 10 times in the past two years.
“The trend of e-cigarettes has created a sort of vocabulary around it,” Ms. Martin said.
Many new entries are informal words or abbreviations that reflect people’s changing media consumption habits and the Internet’s ever-increasing prominence.
They include also “binge-watch,” which refers to rapidly viewing multiple episodes of TV shows.
