Interesting Facts

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) has added over 1,000 words. (New entries include air-punching - the act of thrusting a clenched fist into the air in elation or triumph. Agender for designating people who do not identify themselves as a particular gender. Bovver - part of the catchphrase of comedian Catherine Tate's teenage character Lauren (Bovvered?) Budgie smugglers - close-fitting swimming trunks Dudettes - the female form of dude. Fro-yo - the short form for frozen yoghurt. Starter marriages are short-lived first marriages. *Stupid o'clock - used to describe a time outside normal waking hours. *See!  I told you it would make it in eventually.) A couple of new abbreviations were added too:- ICYMI (in case you missed it) FWIW (for what it's worth)

Seemingly the word "twerk", which was made famous (notorious) by Miley Cyrus' antics on stage and has just made it into the Oxford English dictionary, is almost 200 years old. (It was first used as a noun in 1820, but was spelt “twirk”, and referred to a “twisting or jerking movement” or “twitch”. The verb is believed to have emerged later in 1848, and the “twerk” spelling was in popular use by 1901. So, Miley Cyrus, stick that in your e-cigarette and vape it.)

A new gender honorific 'Mx' is now an officially recognised title in the UK. (Mx, which is used by transgender people or other individuals who do not wish to identify with a particular gender is joining  'Mr, Mrs, Miss and Ms' on driving licences and other official documents in the UK, and is now accepted by Royal Mail, high street banks, government departments and some universities.  It is also under consideration for inclusion in the next edition of the Oxford English Dictionary.)

The sixth edition of the Oxford English Dictionary has removed the hyphen from around 16,000 words. (Some hyphenated words are now one, e.g. pigeon-hole is now pigeonhole and leap-frog is leapfrog. In other cases the hyphen has been removed to form two words instead of one. Pot-belly shall henceforth be pot belly.)

The final board of the 2013 British Scrabble championships contained words that don't appear in the Oxford English Dictionary. (But don't worry, there was no cheating going on, as they did appear in the official Scrabble dicationary. The 12 most obscure words on the final board were:- Aecia : A fruiting body of a rust fungus Coniines : Alkaloid that makes up the poisonous part of hemlock Vela : Plural of velum, a glass screen Zeds : Plural word for the letter Z Khis : Plural of khi, a letter in the Greek alphabet Fy: To digest Enew : (Hawk) Falconry term for driving a bird into the water Qat : variant spelling of khat, a plant whose leaves are chewed as a stimulant Litu : Plural of Litas, a former silver coin and monetary unit of Lithuania Atigi : Parka worn by the Inuits in northern Canada Bandura : Ukrainian lute Swarf : A swoon; grit abraded from an axle No...

Once a word gets into the Scrabble Dictionary, it never drops out. Source - Wikipedia   (The only exception is for words mistakenly included. For example "pH", which in the 1990s was taken out when someone realised it was an abbreviation. According to the publisher, Collins "Scrabble players don't like to unlearn words."   I'm not sure if you can "unlearn" something. BTW - I'm sure one of the words in this picture should be "bitten".)

In Anglo Saxon times, the second month of the year, corresponding roughly with the Roman (and modern) month of February, was called Solmonath. (‘Monath’ is the Old English word for a month, and the direct ancestor of our modern English word ‘month’. ‘Sol’ is the Old English word for ‘mud’, so Solmonath meant ‘Mud Month’, which is very appropriate given the British weather at this time of year.  According to Dictionary.com a lesser-used term was Kale-monath, which meant “cabbage month.”  I guess that reflected the wonderful English cuisine of the time.)

Researchers at Harvard University and Google have found that the English language has expanded by 8,500 words a year in the new millennium and now stands at 1,022,000 words. ( But nearly half of the new words are not included in any dictionary and are dubbed lexical "dark matter". They are either slang or invented jargon.  Which is why we have the Urban Dictionary.)   Source

The Romanian Academy, Romania's linguistic watchdog, has promised to change the definition of an anti-Semitic word included in a widely-circulated dictionary. (The offending dictionary gave the definition of the word 'jidan', (a pejorative term for Jew), as merely a "familiar" term. A Jewish group, The Centre for Monitoring and Combating Anti-Semitism in Romania, slammed it as "shameful", and the academy promised in a letter, "In future editions of the dictionary, definitions will be worded so as not to leave room for discriminatory interpretations. Hmm - I wonder what they'd make of the Urban Dictionary.")

A Queensland University of Technology physics lecturer has found a 99-year-old mistake in the Oxford English Dictionary. (Dr Stephen Hughes said he discovered last year that the dictionary's definition of the word siphon was incorrect. A siphon is a tube commonly used to empty containers of liquid that are otherwise difficult or impossible to empty. Since 1911 the Oxford English Dictionary had incorrectly stated that atmospheric pressure was the operating force in a siphon when in fact it is gravity. The incorrect entry is being corrected as I type.)

Scrabble has announced that under new rules, proper nouns will be allowed in the game. (To date the rules have been clear, place names, people's names and the names of companies or brands don't count. But now a whole new world (literally) of opportunity has opened up. I can imagine the new arguments that will arise on spelling, and validity.   We need a proper nouns dictionary.)

Ammon Shea spent a whole year reading the Oxford English Dictionary. (That's not the little one you keep in your pocket, it's the whole thing - 20 volumes, 21,730 pages and 59 million words. He reckons it was as enriching as reading a novel, I reckon he's bonkers.)