NGL, September Scrabble games are about to get a lot more interesting.
Merriam-Webster dictionary just added over 690 new words to the English language's official vocabulary, and a lot of them are straight out of TikTok.
Social media dominates the new words in the book (or digital version), including 'grammable aka “suitable to be posted on Instagram”; finsta, a “secret or incognito account on the Instagram photo-sharing service"; and thirst trap, a term for "desperately seeking attention."
Also, officially in the dictionary: doggo (slang for dog), jorts (shorts made of denim), mid (a synonym for meh), ngl (the official abbreviation for not gonna lie), and bussin' (extremely good).
Naturally, there are plenty of new academic additions to the dictionary, including terms for emerging technology and AI, but Boomers eager to translate rizz, zhuzh, or smishing now have an official entry point to 2023's version of American English.
“We’re very excited by this new batch of words,” said Peter Sokolowski, Editor at Large at Merriam-Webster. “We hope there is as much insight and satisfaction in reading them as we got from defining them.”
The dictionary company also released an infographic to illustrate how words are added to the official lexicon. Essentially, if a word is significant enough to the English language, used by a large group of people and consistently incorporated into speech and writing over a period of time, it has a chance to become official.
In 2022, Merriam-Webster added cringe, baller, lewk, oat milk, omakase, and many more terms still very much prevalent in the culture today.