June’s update to the Oxford English Dictionary includes almost 2,000 new or revised entries. Some terms have gained status through the worlds of technology or gender politics. Others are just good, old-fashioned slang (hello, use it or lose it), that have finally become mainstream enough to make the cut.
(MORE: Scrabble Adds ‘Grrl’ to Game Dictionary)
Here is a smattering of the OED‘s newly approved terms:
Brain, being the rather important entity it is, has been given new subentries this time around. These include brain candy, meaning “broadly appealing, undemanding entertainment which is not intellectually stimulating.” You may be familiar with its cousins eye-candy and ear candy.
New scientific terms also include cryonaut: “A person who is cryogenically preserved with a view to being revived in the distant future.” There will, presumably, be a photo of Austin Powers alongside this entry in any future print editions.
There are also more technological terms like auto-complete—which, as any kid who’s used Google can tell you, is “a software feature that uses text already entered in a given field to predict or generate the characters the user is likely to enter next.”
Gender reassignment, meaning “the process of a person adopting the physical characteristics of the opposite sex by means of medical procedures such as surgery or hormone treatment,” is now included, perhaps given more clout by people like Chaz Bono.
Environmentally unfriendly has been added, though it does not (funny as it would be) refer to someone who is rude while recycling, but rather to something “designed, produced, or operating in a way that causes, or does not minimize, harm to the natural environment.”
And two familiar slang terms that have made it into the benchmark dictionary are to laugh it up (which one uses “to suggest an impending reversal of fortune,” as in, “Go on. Laugh it up. But you’ll see. You’ll all see.”) and use it or lose it, which OED defines simply as, “an admonition.”
(For a full list of terms, check the OED’s “What’s new” portion of their site.)