Everything evolves with time among which language is one of the most important sociological aspects that evolves with generation and culture in the influence of various people or communities. Every year a collection of words gets approved to be added in the respectable place like a dictionary and recently many millennial words were included in the Merriam-Webster dictionary to legitimise the use of the popular urban language and take a step forward toward acceptance of the new culture and generational features.
Merriam-Webster dictionary added around eight thousand and forty new words in 2018. In the era of global technology, food trends, and social movements, these words cement the urbanisation of language in the present terminology. Lia Petronio, a Digital Web Developer and a lecturer at Northeastern University gathered some of the words from the new entrants’ list to demonstrate the new terminology to ease the process of advancement.
These words include abbreviations, blended words, social media language, food names, and technology that we usually come across in our daily lives. Some of the abbreviations that are popular in the world of food are avo as in avocado, guac for guacamole, zuke short for zucchini, marg for a margarita. Other approved abbreviations are adorbs for adorable, rando as in random, fav for favourite and bougie for the bourgeois.
Few of these newly added words are blended words like hangry that means irritable or angry because of hunger, mocktail for a non-alcoholic cocktail and zoodles for a long strip of zucchini which resembles the thin strips of noodles. The other words that we often hear in social media are Instagramming which means sharing a post in the photo-sharing medium named Instagram. Another word that is often seemed to be used is predictive for an input technology built-in devices to suggest words to the user to enter in the text field.
There are many well-known and frequently used words that have emerged with time and for convenience. However, it is desired that with advancement there will be no degradation of the dictionary of the English language terminology.
Rubena Bose