Dictionary.com is keeping up with the times, announcing the addition of 450 new terms and updates to more than 7,000 entries that touch on the pandemic, race, social justice, identity and culture.
Among the changes is the capitalization of the word “Indigenous” and the addition of “BIPOC,” an abbreviation for Black, Indigenous and people of color – a reflection of how the Black Lives Matter movement has spurred a nationwide reckoning.
The racial justice movement also contributed to the popularity of at least three other increasingly common words: “overpolice,” a verb used to describe excessively policing or an aggressive response to minor offenses; “racialization,” the act of viewing and interacting with people from a racist perspective; and “disenfranchisement,” the act of depriving citizens of their rights, especially the right to vote.
John Kelly, managing editor at Dictionary.com, said the latest round of updates revealed Thursday is unprecedented as the pandemic continues to shake up the English language and force people to update their own vocabulary.
“We haven’t seen anything like the pace and the scope of updating the dictionary like we have seen with coronavirus words,” he told the New York Daily News of new entries such as “superspreader.”
The changes are also part of the website’s effort to revamp entries related to race and identity.
“It’s a testament to how deeply as a culture we are thinking about the language of race, identity and marginalized groups,” he said.
The website decided to remove the noun “slave” when referring to people, replacing it with the adjective “enslaved” or referring to the institution of slavery, a move Kelly described as an effort to represent people with “due dignity and humanity.” An entry for abolitionist Harriet Tubman was among those affected.
“What’s the effect of calling Tubman an escaped slave?” Kelly said. “It’s dehumanizing to her and dehumanizing to everyone affected by slavery … and it fails to hold slavers accountable.”
“Words matter and how definitions are entered affects real people in the real world,” Kelly told The News.
Several new terms that became popular during the pandemic were also added to the database, including “hybrid learning” and “doomscrolling” – the practice of obsessively checking the news and social media feeds in search of updates on negative stories.
On a positive note – for dog lovers, at least – a series of words have been added to describe hybrid breeds, including “Labradoodle,” a crossbred from a Labrador retriever and a poodle; “goldendoodle,” a mix between a golden retriever and a poodle; and “puggle,” a crossbred from a pug and a beagle.
Other additions include:
– Critical Race Theory: A conceptual framework that considers the impact of historical laws and social structures on the perpetuation of racial inequality
– finna: A phonetic spelling representing the African American Vernacular English variant of “fixing to”
– jingoistic: Militantly nationalistic or chauvinistic
– paroxysmal: Sudden and uncontrolled
– Pomsky: A dog crossbred from a Pomeranian and a Siberian husky
reification: The act of treating something abstract, such as an idea, relation, system, quality, etc., as if it were a concrete object
– schnoodle: A dog crossbred from a miniature schnauzer and a poodle
– sponcon: Short for sponsored content
– supposably: As may be assumed, imagined or supposed
– Yorkiepoo: A dog crossbred from a Yorkshire terrier and a miniature poodle or a toy poodle.
