‘BFF,’ ‘Zombie Bank’: Actual New Entries in the Dictionary

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Mark Weiss/Corbis

You know you’re old when text-speak gets incorporated into the dictionary.

The New Oxford American Dictionary has released its annual list of added words, and it’s a doozy. Abbreviations like BFF (best friend forever) and TTYL (talk to you later) made the cut, as did timely terms like hockey mom and vuvuzela. Some echo the Oxford Dictionary of English’s additions, like LBD (little black dress) and bromance.

Check out a few other, choice additions:

  • hashtag n. (on social networking websites such as Twitter) a hash or pound sign (#) used to identify a particular keyword or phrase in a posting.
  • Interweb n. humorous the Internet.
  • megachurch n. a church with an unusually large congregation, typically one preaching a conservative or evangelical form of Christianity.
  • truthiness n. informal the quality of seeming or being felt to be true, even if not necessarily true.
    – ORIGIN early 19th cent. (in the sense ‘truthfulness’): coined in the modern sense by US humorist Stephen Colbert (1964–).
  • wardrobe malfunction n. informal, humorous an instance of a person accidentally exposing an intimate part of their body as a result of an article of clothing slipping out of position.
  • zombie bank n. informal a financial institution that is insolvent but that continues to operate through government support.

See the rest of the additions at Oxford University Press’s blog.