London: The ever-present hum of the vuvuzela during this year's soccer World Cup catapulted the plastic trumpet to instant fame and now it has earned itself a place in the revered Oxford Dictionary of English.
Vuvuzela is among 2,000 new words and phrases added to the third edition of the dictionary, published on Thursday, which is compiled from analysis of two billion words used in everything from novels to Internet message boards.
Terms and phrases relating to the credit crunch feature heavily in this year's additions, with words such as "overleveraged", having taken on too much debt and "quantitative easing", the introduction of new money into the money supply by the central bank, making an entry.
"Staycation", a holiday spent in one's home country, and "bargainous", costing less than usual, also reflect the hot topic of belt-tightening among consumers during the economic downturn.
The rise of "social media", itself a new term, has spawned several additions, including "defriend", removing someone from a list of friends or contacts on a social networking site, and "tweetup", a meeting organised via posts on Twitter.
Other words include:
Bromance: a close but non-sexual relationship between two men
Buzzkill: a person or thing that has a depressing or dispiriting effect
Cheeseball: lacking taste, style or originality
Chillax: calm down and relax
Frenemy: a person with whom one is friendly despite a fundamental dislike or rivalry
Interweb: the Internet
Wardrobe malfunction: an instance of a person accidentally exposing an intimate part of their body as result of an article of clothing slipping out of position.
Comments
0 comment