Like farmers coming back in from a bountiful harvest, the hard-working wordsmiths at Merriam-Webster this week have laid out 533 new words they’ve plucked from the linguistic back 40 — all for your rhetorical enjoyment.
Even if you don’t regularly use “aphantasia” or “solopreneur” — or even “dad joke” — it seems that enough folks out there have been employing them in complete sentences to merit a toehold in the venerable dictionary.
“My favorite new word?” says Peter Sokolowski, editor at large for Merriam-Webster. “Well, it’s inside baseball, but we’re linguists and there’s a term from Boston called ‘non-rhotic,’ which means not pronouncing the letter ‘r’ unless it’s followed by a vowel — as in ‘I’ll pahk the cah.'”
He says he loves it “because it expresses how the dictionary works: the term has been around for 50 years but it’s been mostly used by scholars and linguists. But because of social media, the curtain is being pulled back and it’s being used more by the general public. As a language guy, I think that’s just fantastic!”
So go ahead. Use it in a sentence. We dare you.
“These new terms and uses offer a window into how the English language is changing and expanding,” the company said in a news release, “with linguistic innovations coming from a variety of fields and endeavors, from business to sports, from law to today’s headlines.”
Many of the words, which make the cut after a team researches and validates their use in the printed and digital pages of popular culture, will seem like no-brainers: The term “free solo,” for example, was made popular by the Oscar-winning 2018 documentary about rock climber Alex Honnold’s attempts to conquer the first free solo climb of Yosemite’s El Capitan. Meanwhile, a “red flag law” has been all over the news in recent months as the national debate over gun control rages on.
“Dad joke” has also achieved a commonplace status in our English-language realm. Why — and why now? Because, Sokolowski says, “it’s no longer just those two words: Once we got to the point where it’s not just a joke told by a dad but, rather, a very specific thing, it gets lexicalized” — “form, express, or accept as (a word) in the vocabulary of a language,” for all you out there who didn’t know the definition of that — “and ‘dad joke’ is now its own thing.”
So how, exactly, does a word become a real word? This silly infographic “explains” the process.
Actually, we’ll let Sokolowski explain: He says a team of editors furiously scrubs print and online publications to identify words and phrases that have become widely used and popular enough to warrant consideration for a place in the big book. “We look for evidence,” he says, “and once we’ve found that evidence, it goes into the dictionary. The question is: How fast does it go in? We tend to wait a while to make sure that that word sticks around.”
Take the word “blog.” Sokolowski says that while it was first put into use in the late ’90s, it wasn’t included until several years later. And that, he says, “is light speed for a word to get into the dictionary.”
He explains that junior editors submit their new words for consideration, and the final gate-keeper is Stephen Perrault, a guy “who’s been with the company since 1979,” says Sokolowski, 49. “When I joined, there were 45 editors that included seven who were here before I was born. One started back in 1958!”
Some of the more recognizable new words added this time around “include ‘red flag law,’ which is a law allowing courts to prevent people who show signs of being a danger to themselves or to others from having access to firearms, and ‘deep state,’ which refers to an alleged secret network of especially nonelected government officials operating extralegally to influence and enact government policy,” according to Merriam-Webster. “The environmentally conscious may be familiar with the new word ‘fatberg,’ which is a large mass of fat and solid waste that collects in a sewer system.”
From the world of sports and games, there’s the aforementioned ”free solo.” “Those who prefer less risky adventures,” adds Merriam-Webster, “might be more familiar with ‘escape room,’ a game in which participants confined to a room or other enclosed setting (such as a prison cell) are given a set amount of time to find a way to escape (as by discovering hidden clues and solving a series of riddles or puzzles).”
The domain of business and finance is actively shaping the language as well, the company says.
“New entries from that realm range from what might be labeled as business jargon — a “solopreneur” is, unsurprisingly, a solo entrepreneur — to the useful and efficient “pain point,” which is a “persistent or recurring problem (as with a product or service) that frequently inconveniences or annoys customers,” the company said. Also new is a financial sense of the word “haircut,” which is defined as “a reduction in the value of an asset.”
The dictionary also got a few new words that foodies will love. They include “matcha,” that pleasing finely ground green tea powder; ”halloumi,” a beloved cheese from Cyprus; and “quaffer,” which is a person who quaffs a beverage made for quaffing — in other words, a drinker.
The fields of science and medicine bring us ”aphantasia,” or “the inability to form mental images of real or imaginary people, places, or things,” and the term for a self-relaxation technique known as ”autogenic training,” along with new gender-neutral pronouns of non-binary ‘they’ and ‘themself.”
Merriam-Webster also lexicalized ”tallboy,” as in a can of beer, and “inking” (tattoo). Then, course, there is “dad joke,” defined as “a wholesome joke of the type said to be told by fathers with a punchline that is often an obvious or predictable pun or play on words and usually judged to be endearingly corny or unfunny.”
